I have just received my EE sim card here in the UK I have a MikroTik SXT 4G kit and have literally plugged it in directly to my Macbook and sat outside looking at the EE mobile mast which is about 1km away with perfect line of site.
The only changes I have made from default are;
Created a APN with The name of EE and the APN name of everywhere
Under LTE I then set the Network Mode to LTE only and picked Band 3 and Set the APN profile to EE that I created above and then finally ticked Enable and saved.
That’s it! The LTE internet connection was made.
My issue is that like I said I have clear line of sight to the mobile mast but the bars on the device only go to 4 not 5 but hay its just a light.
I load speedtest.net and am getting 74Mbps download speed and 30.76Mbps upload with a 36Sec ping which is actually really good compared to the BT phone line speed results.
Well that’s all good the only thing is that the iPhone7+ which was with me was getting 120Mbs download with an upload of 35.7 and a 42Sec ping.
My client saw this and is wanting to know why the specialist Mikrotik isn’t getting close to the same speed as an iPhone.
Have I missed a setting or is this normal?
Should I have bought a different Router for him with such a good signal and line of sight?
Not an expert here. I dont think you are going to get much better speeds than what you have gotten. The reason i believe this is because the sxt has a 10/100 port so wont be able to get more than that. The 4g modem you have doesnt support CA as it is only a class 4 modem where as the iphone7+ has a higher class modem that supports CA.
There’s a new type of LTE modem (R11e LTE6 https://mikrotik.com/product/r11e_lte6 ), it should be a drop-in replacement for LTE modem currently in your SXT 4G kit (which is R11e-4G). That one should get up to 300/50 Mbps. However, the problem of ethernet port speed of SXT 4G kit (up to 100 Mbps) will remain and will severely limit maximum speed you can get. OK, one could connect two ethernet cables and create a balance-rr bond so it would be 200Mbps, which is still less than LTE6 modem can do.
The “new” SXT LTE6 kit is essentially the same (RBSXTR plus LTE modem) so changing the whole device will end up with same limits.
Also, to be honest, iPhone has some of the best modems in the world, and costs much much more too. We currently only have CAT4 and CAT6 modems, but are working on faster devices also. They will come out next year.