I am trying a TRB140 for the first time. It basically works, but mobile data speed is significantly lower than I get on my phone. What should I expect?
Specifically, I have an EE UK SIM. I’m in an urban location but there are some big stone buildings between me and the nearest mobile base station, so signal strength is poor; I typically get 2 bars on my phone.
Testing with speedtest dot net, my iPhone 16 (set to 4G) gets about 120 Mbit/sec, my old iPhone Xs gets about 60 Mbit/sec, and the TRB140 gets only about 8 Mbit/sec. That’s with the same SIM and the devices in the same physical position.
One difference is antenna diversity. Apparently the iPhone 16 has 4x4 MIMO and the iPhone Xs has 2x2 MIMO, but the TRB140 has a single antenna. I understand that could make an X2 difference to the speed, in which case it doesn’t explain the difference that I’m seeing.
What are your experiences? Would a better antenna help significantly? How can I determine where the bottleneck is?
Thanks for any advice.
(Edit : I had useful links, but “new users are only allowed to post two links”, so I’ve obfuscated most of them, ugh.)
Cat-4 has a hard ceiling of 150 Mbps under ideal lab conditions, meaning real-world speeds are typically much lower (often 20–50 Mbps).
Cat-12 has a ceiling of 600 Mbps, allowing it to push much higher speeds in the same environment.
Cat-4, your device can only listen to a single slice of spectrum at a time.
Cat-12 can glue multiple carrier frequencies together from the cell tower, vastly multiplying your throughput if your mobile operator actually supports multi-band aggregation in your area.
Cat-4 uses standard 64-QAM modulation. Think of it as a delivery truck carrying 6 bits of data per signal unit.
Cat-12 uses 256-QAM modulation. This upgrades the truck to carry 8 bits of data in the exact same footprint, immediately yielding a 33% speed increase on every single band, even under identical signal conditions.
When cell networks get crowded, a Cat-4 device gets severely bottlenecked because it has no alternative pathways. If its single connected band drops to a real-world 5 Mbps due to congestion, a Cat-12 device in the exact same spot can easily pull 75 Mbps (a 15X difference) because it bypasses the congestion by stitching together three different bands, packing more data into each band via 256-QAM, and utilizing four streams instead of two.
Another thing to keep in mind is far superior RF tuning on mobile phones. Even if you have a device that has same modem as your phone, phone will in many cases dish out higher speeds. This is why its completely pointless comparing your phone with your LTE/5G router even when they have exact same specs and operating in same environment with same SIM card. And this is the mistake that majority of people do. Its not always about the speed.
Could anyone please share what speeds they have actually achieved with a TRB140 (or another device with the same 4G hardware)? I would be especially interested to hear about low-signal-strength (2 bar) experiences, but any numbers would be interesting.
Also: are there any stats that could help me to understand this? I can see signal strength graphs in the web UI, which I guess correspond to the LEDs; are any other numbers available, e.g. bit error rate, something related to contention with other users, etc?
Question: would an antenna with more gain help? Note that the RSSI is “good”, so maybe just increasing the signal strength would not be helpful, i.e. it would amplify the noise as well as the signal.
Does anyone know what the gain of the supplied antenna is?
I would still love to hear actual speed numbers from others, for comparison! Thanks!
