I am looking for an LTE router as backup for my internet connection. I need to connect to a base station 1km away but do not have a direct line of sight. My house has well isolated HR++ glass so LTE signal is pretty limited, except for a small window with a plastic plane that just fits a small antenna
I do have a cheap Chinese LTE router but that is too limited for me as it seems to be changing LTE band without giving any control over it and even using double NAT for routing has strange limitations. I prefer a gateway that does NAT and routes all internal traffic to my firewall (pfSense).
I am therefore looking for a better device:
Preferably CAT6 or better
Control over LTE modem (channel selection etc)
Proper router with at least NAT + decent static route management for my network (quite a few RFC1918 ranges)
connections for external antennas
Some more wishes that are negotiable:
POE powered
wall mounted
I have been looking at the wAP ac LTE6 and chateau lte12. the chateau seems to have a comparable processor but more ram and a CAT12 modem, but cannot be wall mounted (why Mikrotik? a simple bracket would have been enough) and no POE powering. Are there other differences in the modems in the wAP and the Chateau? The wAP ac LTE6 has the advantage that it will probably just fit in the small window.
And are there other options to consider? I do NOT need WIFI as the device will only act as the gateway. I had a look at the RBM11/33 with the LTE6 modem but I guess these are older hardware and less interesting? They seem to have limited availability anyways.
I don’t have enough experience to really nail it down for you, but I have used a solution involving an LtAP router, EM160R-GL Cat16 LTE modem, and a QuPanel APLM4 LTE MIMO 4x4 directional antenna with seventeen foot lead mounted to roof. It is PoE powered, so install where needed. Running firmware v7.2.1 (v7 required to run the 3rd party modem).
I’m not using the onboard wifi of the LtAP. The unit is just a router than can hold the modem and sim slot I needed.
In your case I’d definitely go for an outdoor device. I personally use the LDF LTE6 kit (ref. RBLDFR&R11e-LTE6), it does support PoE (both passive and “real” 802.3af/at). You can try to point it directly to the BS with no additional hardware, but as you are not quite close to it, you’d certainly need a sat dish to get some more gain. It works amazingly well, connection is rock stable (but I can’t point out enough how the build quality of the dish impacts the stability of the connection! We are using Kathrein CAS series a feed adapters). One of our device is at 2.4km NLOS from the BS, we’ve had heavy rain and thunderstorms this summer with no connection loss (only once, the signal strength went from “excellent” to “good”.)…
The new ATL LTE18 kit might also be a nice option with better hardware (2CPUs instead of 1 and 4x more RAM) but the antenna has less gain compared with what you’d get with a LDF6 + good dish
The Chinese router got me some 10/1 Mbps. I now got a Chateau LTE12. With that I found out that on the other side of the house I got a decent signal to a tower that is further away. I now get upto 90/45Mb. I probably could have gotten that to some extend with the Chinesium device but I am so happy with the Chateau as it can show me the results of what I am doing.
The results are good enough for me. Happy with my Chateau that now will serve as LTE router as well as WIFI AP.
Yes. Chateau Is awesome. 90/45mbps is very good. With MikroTik, we always know what’s happening, even when things don’t work. We feel like we are in control on most things. Of course, nothing is perfect as the use-case gets complex.
MHF4 to SMA, 4in for M.2 modem antenna connections. A mini PCI-E to m.2 adapter for the modem itself. Setup was seamless and automatic after that. It just worked.