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PlanktonCroissant
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Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:51 pm

Slower than expected connection with SXT LTE6

Mon Aug 30, 2021 5:19 pm

Recently, we acquired a SXT LTE 6 kit to provide connectivity to one of our outbuildings as part of a renovation project. We have direct line-of-sight to a number of cellphone towers and given that our only other option for Internet connectivity was DSL, we thought that this was a great opportunity to see if an LTE connection was a viable replacement for the DSL connections we have.

Unfortunately, we're not seeing the connection speeds that we'd hoped for and we're not sure why. When using our phones to connect to the same tower and cell that the SXT does and in the same location, we see connection of 58Mbps down and 13Mbps up, while the SXT gets about 1/3rd of that - 6.8Mbps down and 1.4Mbps up. Although the modem types are different in the two devices, we still expected better performance from the SXT. We realize that we're on the edge of the cell connection, but that's still a big discrepancy in speeds, unless the class 16 LTE modem in the phone performs 3x (or more) than the class 6 LTE modem in the SXT.

The SXT is connecting to tower 138340 cell 13 and cell 23 for CA. This tower is located on top of a mountain roughly 5km away and 10 degrees north from us. We have tried two different T-Mobile MVNOs (Google Fi and US Mobile), and both carriers get about the same speed on the SXT. We occasionally pick up cell 4 on tower 57980 (to our west), but that tower only has band 12, and is further away. We do not pick up towers 128609 & 141700 (south of us), or 141697 & 127840 (to our east) due to local topography. We will occasionally see tower 146271, but connecting to that tower gives very poor performance.

The SXT is connected to a Unifi USG which performs speed tests twice daily, and the 6.8/1.4 speeds are consistent regardless of time of day. As the USG does have a second WAN port, and we could use that with a second SXT (or some other equipment) to connect to the same (or a different) tower to potentially double our speeds, but there may be something in the setup that has been overlooked.

Our questions are:
  • Is the SXT is the correct piece of equipment to use for this setup?
  • Is there something that I've missed with the SXT's configuration, or am not understanding about the setup?
  • Is tower 138340 the best tower to use?
I've attached some screenshots showing the connection to the cell tower via the phone and from the SXT.

Any hints as to how we could improve our speed would be appreciated.
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