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mobile broadband in poor signal area

  • 19-10-2010 11:26pm
    #1
    ardmacha
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,476 ✭✭✭


    I have a house that I use a a holiday house. I can get real broadband there, as DSL is available, but the fixed cost of this is high for the number of days in the year that I send there.

    The mobile signal isn't great. I get 4 bars of GSM on a phone, myphoneexplorer shows this as -89DBm. O2 and Meteor masts are pretty much in the same place so I might get Edge from these. Mobile browsing works, but I could do with some way of downloading attachments to a laptop etc.

    There are 3 masts about 8Km away, these show up as 3G on the phone network listing, but the service cannot be used indoors, it drops to 2G.

    I don't want to buy a load of kit if 3G is not going to work anyway.

    I propose to buy an unlocked Huawei modem with external antenna socket e.g. E160. A gold plated solution would be to plug this into a Wi-Fi router and a big aerial and stick the whole lot up in the roof space. But I propose trying it to see if I can get a 3g signal, before doing this.

    Two questions
    can phone sims be used in these modems, and what limitations arise from doing this?
    is any of this likely to work?


Comments

  • #2
    jor el
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16,713 ✭✭✭✭jor el


    It sounds like you are going to have a very hard time getting anything that remotely resembles a decent or reliable service. You won't know until you try, but it will be a lot of money wasted if it doesn't work.

    I'd give it 50/50 at best, but to be honest, I think that's even a bit optimistic. If you can't get even a bare hint of 3G in the house, then you're probably wasting your time trying to use this. Even if you do get a signal in the end, it won't take much to cause you to lose it. It will be unreliable.

    A standard phone SIM may or may not work, it's up to the network to allow you to buy the mobile broadband add-on or not. Some won't let you buy it unless you buy the modem and SIM together.


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