Okay, so long story short I bought a house and got screwed over by the cable company who lied about servicing internet at that adress. I'm left with three options:
Exede Satellite - 12/3mbps with a 25GB monthly cap - 130$
Clear - 6/1 unlimited - 50$
millenicom - sprint 3g/4g speeds - unlimited(50GBmin) - 70$
The satellite will have ungodly response times and ill definitely want to exceed 25GB every month. So now onto clear and millenicom (which is just offering sprints service through their contract at much better pricing).
The problem is on my roof i get sprint 3g service 3 bars. I am 2 miles outside of the outskirts of the sprints 4g coverage map. and 6 miles from the nearest 4g tower (there were two other towers around my house but neither were 4g).
I'm wondering how possible would it be to amplify my signal from my house to pick up this 4g signal. The area between me and the tower is about has some trees, a lot of open fields and farms, and mostly suburb housing. I can raise my antenna up as high as need be, but really only about 15ft over the roof is needed to clear tree line (the tallest/oldest trees in the line of sight are right around my house, afaik)
I haven't found many choices when it came to wimax ampilifiers and antennas (in the 2.5ghz band). 3watts seems to be the highest I can find, and I just don't know if that'll be strong enough. Not sure if I can post links in this thread so i'll just post the models of what I was looking at.
amplifier :
cm2500w
outdoor antenna :
2.5-GHz-2.7-GHz-WiMax-Grid-Antenna 24dbi gain
probably the sierra 3g/4g hotspot as the modem device.
Anyways i'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or recommendations with this. It's hard to find real world numbers on how well these amplifiers really increase range. It may say 50miles, but thats in open sea, and probably doesnt even get that.
Thanks!
Ps = (1.5 x 6 x .75) / {(4/3) (pi) [(31.039 x 10^15) (46.5 x 10^9)]^3}
Seems like a waste..
Assuming you are 6 miles from a WiMAX site, I would be surprised if you where able to get a signal. I had Clear/Sprint WiMAX service from Jan '09 - June '12. The key would be getting a device or a tech to test.
Here is a few links from a thread I had going back a few years.
Does your phone company offer DSL? Check it out and see if they can service you with DSL--then go to Earthlink or dslextreme.com and see if you can buy service from them and avoid the no-phone surcharge that the direct providers like to impose (I'm assuming you don't have a landline) -- its the same service minus the no landline fee (Earthlink also has contracts with numerous cable companies and I recommend them whole-heartedly for those who want to keep their satellite dish for TV and have cable only for the internet). These companies have no skin in the game, so to speak--so they don't play pricing games if you don't have the phone or TV services Reason I say call the phone company first is because the search engines for the non-directs suck if you don't have an existing line, and the phone company will tell you for sure if you can get the service... then call the non-directs and say "the phone company said..." if their own search engine says you aren't served.
To be honest, I'd take a 1.5 meg DSL line over the 2 non-Clear options you listed. The chance of getting Clear is about zero, unless you have a DIRECT line of site to the tower, and use a 3 or 4 foot parabolic dish and aim it at the tower. This will need to clear the trees, and be rock steady--as in, build your own mini tower to mount it on (a 3+ grand endeavor + a grand for equipment). Clear isn't expanding any time soon, so the chance of new coverage is pretty much zero in the next 5 years. Sprint *will* have LTE in your area--but they haven't released it to resellers, and we don't know if they will--and if they will price it low enough for providers like Millenicom to offer near unlimited service (I doubt it).
I have extensive experience with satellite... simply stay away--unless it's the old one-way service like DirecPC classic--which limits you to dialup speeds on the uplink (you dial up and use the modem for the uplink, satellite for downlink). There is just too much latency on 2 way satellite--I grew up at my parent's place in the middle of nowhere and had DirecPC one-way in 1998ish. After I moved out I upgraded them to DirecWay around 2003 and then Wildblue around 2008. It is SLOW--the only benefit is that once the download starts, its nice and fast... surfing is worse than dialup.... think a 2 second wait every time you see "looking for google.com" "waiting for google.com" "connecting to google.com" -- for every single image on the page. True the images pop up immediately--but it's insanely frustrating waiting on the latency for the server to respond.
In fact, with my parents now retired and moving, I will be taking over their old place in the next 6 months--and I've went to an extreme that you may consider if it's really that bad: getting a T1 line. It's going to cost me 320 per month, but includes 2 landlines. T1s are available practically anywhere a phone line can be had, and are rock solid 1.5 up and down. I only justified it because the mortgage is so cheap that even if I have to pay out the cash to the the phone company it's still cheaper than hat I'm paying in rent + cable internet now--plus I use my connection a lot for work, so the reliability is needed.
Forgot to add... look for any local ISPs that have WiMax or Motorola Canopy service in your area. I've found MANY areas have these--they are usually poorly advertised and you have to call around. They usually will mount the antenna on top of the local "transmitter hill" or grain elevator/highest point--and as long as you can physically see it, you can get service.
Being that you mentioned the suburbs, I just can't imagine you are truly devoid of all options. My parent's place is the exception--no wireless service of any kind, no cable, no DSL, and a huge hill in the way between the house and the local ISP's Canopy site.
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