I have the black, boxy one, but the antenna kits work with either type. A company named Waveform makes the kits. I believe their owner or CEO is on Reddit (/u/sinakh). They make two kinds. One is a panel antenna and one is a more directional (log-periodic) antenna. I have the log-periodic antenna installed, but both are well made. Just depends on your needs I think. They are both available on Amazon. The kits come with everything you need except for the lag bolts to drill the mounts into your roof or the side of your house or however you want to mount it. Panel: https://www.amazon.com/Panel-External-Antenna-Hotspots-Routers/dp/B09VVSWF8F/ Log-periodic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VVWMS2F/
I collected some time series data on T-Mobile home internet speed. Green is download speed (Mbps). Blue is upload speed (Mbps). Red is ping (ms).
The data shown was collected approximately* every five 5 minutes for roughly 32 hours. I say approximately because occasionally speedtest will throw a 403 error and an observation gets skipped. The metrics were measured using speedtest.net through a Python API. The code was written in RStudio and plotted using ggplot2.
The Cell ID is 20281377 and the tower is located in a predominantly residential area on the edge of the suburbs in Kyle, TX
I should add, due to the local topography, my house has a fairly obstructed line of sight to the tower from the 1st and 2nd floors. Using the wifi gateway as-delivered yielded an intermittent connection with consistently poor speeds (<5 Mbps down). My rooftop, however, has a perfectly unobstructed line of sight to the nearby tower. I purchased and installed an external 4x4 MIMO panel antenna. The connection quality and speed significantly improved, but the gateway would still intermittently connect to untintended towers that produced poorer connections. I returned the panel antenna and replaced it with the 4x4 MIMO log periodic antenna, which I'm told is much more directional than its panel-type counterpart. This seemed to do the trick, and performance was pretty great.
The gateway would occasionally connect to less favorable bands (B12/N71) causing performance to dip - not terribly, but noticeably. In pursuit of the fatest connection, I added high-pass (1,700MHz+) filters to each of the 4 antenna lines. The gateway now stayed consistently locked on the preferred bands (B66/N41) and produced remarkable connection speeds, both up and down. All other signal metrics were (and remain to this day) excellent.
8 months ago, when I first set all of this up, I was getting download speeds sometimes north of 400 Mbps. Since then, performance has seemed to continuously and consistently degrade over time. This is now particularly noticeable during "primetime" and is almost certainly the result of network/tower congestion.
Our only other option for internet is Spectrum, whom I loathe. While their network speed and consistency is undeniably superior to wireless, their abusive pricing practices are what caused me to cut the cord. My recommendation to others would be this: don't subscribe to TMHI if you need to rely on it and have other options. If you work at home, have a lot of users, or otherwise need consistency, TMHI might not be for you. If, however, you can skate by with occasional periods of 30 Mbps down, and TMHI out-prices the competition in your area? Then maybe it's a good option for you.
I see a lot of one-off TMHI speed tests posted online. I'm hoping this shows that a single speed test can deceptive - in either direction. I share this data so that others can have a realistic expectation of TMHI performance and how it fluctuates throughout the day. As for myself, I will be keeping TMHI...for now.
yes, i got this one, but now my mofi device sim slot is not working. wont keep the card inserted. trying to get a replacement from mofi. keep you posted.
Forget all that crap, just buy a high quality antenna
https://www.amazon.com/Panel-External-Antenna-Hotspots-Routers/dp/B09VVSWF8F