How to get the BEST Cellular Data Speeds and Performance

cellular data performance your speeds and reliability a critical part of using cellular as a mobile internet solution today we're going to be talking about the things that impact your performance and the things that you can do to well counteract those things that are impacting your performance [Music] hi there i'm sheree and i'm chris and we are the hosts of the mobile internet resource center where we help rvers and boaters keep online with educational content and keeping on top of the industry and of course a lot of us are using cellular as a data connection on the go and we want the best performance we want those high speeds we want reliability and there's a lot of things that can impact this and it's a whole lot more than just paying attention to the bars on your phone it's not about the bars it is about the ultimate performance that you get is how fast is your connection is your data dropping out things like that and well there's a lot of things that can impact that way actual performance you end up seeing but first you might be asking how much speed do you need what are you looking for in a good connection and that's going to depend upon what you want to be able to do online video things they take a lot more data and more speed than something like just checking email now again we we often look for like if we're getting like 15 megabits per second down and like you know three to five megabits per second up we consider that oh we can get most of our typical work done without too much problem more is better over 100 megabits per second is happy dance time and sometimes you can get by with even less but you know you gotta shoot for your own personal minimums based on what you're trying to do but if you're doing video conferencing and wanting to stream netflix at night aiming for that 10 to 50 megabits per second down and three to five up is a really good benchmark but there's a whole bunch of other considerations that you can take in that now of course also when you are testing your speeds there are a bunch of ways to do that with different apps like the speed test app we have an entire guide that goes over speed testing tips and how to evaluate the readings that you get so go look at that as well for uh the reliability uh that's something that you're really only going to notice over time is how stable is your connection when you're trying to use it yes does it drop off at random bits and bit pieces in time does your upload stall do pages not fully finish loading things like that you will notice reliability issues the speeds you could check pretty quickly and again pay attention to those things and not to the bars you can sometimes have an absolutely fast fabulous and reliable one bar signal and a horrible slow and unreliable five bar signal and it's all because of these factors that we're about to talk about [Music] the quality of the signal that is being received by your device can have a huge impact on the performance that you're receiving and there's a lot of things that can impact that quality of signal they're usually physical things now we're going to go through the list of them here and in this case actually the bars might have some meaning because they're a bit of a bit of a proxy of how good is the physical signal that is getting to your phone your hotspot your router now one of the most important things that can impact the quality of the signal is the physical distance between you and the tower and there's one wave right over there the distance matters a lot radio frequencies drop off over distance but not all frequencies are created equal lower frequency signals travel a lot further than higher frequency signals so you might have like low band 600 megahertz 700 mega cellular signals can go 10 15 maybe even 20 miles away from the tower and still be picked up whereas higher frequency signals might only go two three four miles and things like millimeter wave signals might only travel a few hundred feet that's why they're only really used on super high speed short range 5g so different frequencies travel different distances and the distance matters a lot now you know short of driving to be closer to the tower which sometimes is an option one of the things you can do to help compensate for the distance is to have a higher gain antenna basically focusing an antenna that can reach out to a signal further on the horizon by narrowing its scope or sometimes like a cellular booster can help you be heard over a further distance it amplifies the tiny little radio in a phone or mobile device to be a louder broadcast so the tower can hear you from a further distance but there's still some other factors that might impact your connection over distance because well sometimes even if you can hear the tower and the tower can hear you cell towers might be configured to ignore any connections from outside of the serving cell distance that they're designed to set up and be configured to serve and so you got to worry about is the tower actually paying attention to you sometimes as well now next up as far as the physical things that impact your signal is not just distance but it is the line of sight if you can see the tower over there odds are the tower can see you hear you and communicate with you if there's things in between you and the tower whether it's a ridge trees other rvs buildings anything any physical obstructions are going to have a huge impact on your performance a lot more than just distance obstructions cause a lot of issues line of sight is everything it matters so much ways you can improve line of sight is well the simplest is usually getting an antenna up and above the clutter up above the ground clutter so you can see further could see the tower at a distance it gets above the rv that's parked next to you above the the dock that your boat is at so having your antenna up high makes a huge difference now related to line of sight is obstructions that are caused by your own gear if you're inside well you're basically blocking line of sight in nearly every direction and different materials block signal different ways fiberglass is okay the signal will go through it okay windows most windows are okay but if you've got like a metal van a metal boat a metal rv metal walls block signal very very upset effectively those obstructions can be very significant if you're parked inside a metal garage or next to a building with aluminum siding that can have horrible horrible impacts on your signal so again the best way to get around that sort of issues is to um get out of the obstructions you know get outside get your your device mount put it in a window you know use a suction cup mount to put your device in a window get antennas out ups up up on your roof up in your fly bridge outside where you've got better chance of avoiding obstructions and then finally the one other thing that can be impacting the quality of your signal is just signal interference other things broadcasting on the same channels you know basically causing you know like two fm channels conflicting with each other when you get to the fringe of radio broadcast if there's signal interference your signal quality goes way down this could be caused by other transmitters other cell towers other cell carriers in the area trying to use some of the same frequency bands if you're in between the boundary of cells that's why there's often dead zones there um it can be caused by well storms electrical storms could be causing interference it could be caused by solar flares and solar storms it can be caused by a badly tuned microwave that's leaking radiation um there's you know things with when it comes down to just random interference there's often not a lot you can do other than just try to move away from the interference if there's a spot over here where you're getting bad signal and over here you're getting good signal might be interference that's the factor and well you might just have to move a little bit [Music] all right some of the other things that can impact your actual performance that you get is the modem that is inside of your cellular device whether you are dealing with mobile hotspots cellular embedded routers cellular tablets or smartphones they all have a modem inside which is what takes that cellular signal converts it to data that you use to get online and the modem has specifications that impact how fast and how many frequency bands they can connect to as the carriers move into the future and they deploy new bands and the modems advance in technology it all is moving forward and if you have an older device you might be stuck in the slow lane and it's worthwhile upgrading your equipment every couple of years to keep up with technology so you're getting the best performance because that modem inside an older one will be able to connect to less frequency bands and be able to do less with those frequency bands when they do connect to them a more advanced modem is able to see more frequency bands and able to combine more of those bands together to give you better performance and the difference between like a category 4 modem and a category 18 modem can be substantial and we do have a full guide going over modem specifications and a video going over showing you some head-to-head comparisons of how that modem difference can make a difference so when you are researching your gear make sure you're looking at the current flagship options that are on the market so that you are giving yourself the most amount of future proofing giving you the most amount of coverage out there as well as the best performance that you can get with your device next is the data plan that you have subscribed to for your cellular data connection and a lot of the terms of your plan can impact your performance two of the most popular ones that you might already have known about is throttling and network management now throttling is on your plan that's usually very clearly specified and it might apply only to certain activities like your mobile hotspot use if you're using mobile hotspot off of a smartphone or a tablet or it might be for video resolution when you have mobile hotspot throttling limitations they might be for all of your mobile hotspot use like some plans restrict you to five megabits per second others might give you a certain amount at high speed and then after you hit that amount in your month the rest of your mobile hotspot use is dropped off to a very slow speed for the remainder of the month that's throttling it doesn't matter how much network congestion there is you are always capped at a certain speed with video some plans tell you that they will only do sd video or hd video what they do is they actually are slowing the speeds of any video traffic so if you're downloading from youtube or netflix or hulu the carrier can detect the type of data that you are using and they slow it down so that you get a lower resolution experience on your video streaming so you're using less data now another one is network management and some of the carriers have gone to calling this priority data basically different plans are priced based upon giving you priority on their networks so if you have a priority data plan you get maybe a certain amount or maybe all of your data maybe all of your data only when you're using it on your smartphone but not for mobile hotspot use or video or anything like that you are getting priority level data and what this means is that when you are on a regular tower pretty much everyone has the same speeds the carriers aren't having to manage their network to deliver the demand that's out there but if you're on a congested tower you get somewhere where there's a lot of population maybe a seasonal influx or as our rvers no as we head to the southern states during the winter we go to quartzite or we go to orlando florida those areas can get really congested for a couple of months out of the year well the speeds on the towers just go down because everyone is there trying to use their data plans and there's just not enough capacity to go around so someone who is subject to network management on their plan or a lower priority this might be a prepaid plan this might be terms on a plan after a certain amount of usage or it just might be a lower priority plan that you've purchased you're going to be at a lower priority than someone who has priority data on their plan and if you compared those two devices now remember your modems have to be almost identical and you have a plan that's subject to priority data and network management you do them side by side you're probably going to see that network managed plan be slower it can be hard to detect now how can you get around this well you can go somewhere that's not congested that's a great option you can wait till next season which might not be an option unfortunately there's not a lot that you can do with network management to get around it because it's a term on your plan but you can play around sometimes with a signal maybe reach a further away tower you might be able to play with advanced features on some routers like band locking to be able to find the frequency bands that are less congested and get on those so there's a lot of options are out there some of them convenient some of them not but congestion is a hard one to get around that's why we preach redundancy and having multiple carriers because you might find on verizon as being very congested but 18t might not be so you can switch around your carriers and get a faster connection [Music] now that was a lot of information there is a guide that we have that goes along with this you can find it right down below go over there you can get a recap of all this information and if you're one of our premium members be sure you're logged in there is a whole bunch more to this guide that goes into a lot more depth on these topics to help you maximize your data performance where you are with your gear and of course there's a lot more to selecting a cellular based system for mobile internet from selecting your right gear your signal enhancing strategy and your data plans and we have resources for all of that we are honored to be able to give away a lot of that for free it's all made possible by our premium members our mobile internet aficionados who keep us funded so we can be unbiased we're not sponsored we are not selling any of this stuff and we don't rely on third party advertising to bring you this content but our premium members and thanks for their funding go further they get more in-depth content they have classrooms for learning they can come into our forums and ask questions and get interactive guidance from our staff and of course they can also come to our webinars and some vendors give discounts as well so if mobile internet is going to be an important part of your lifestyle consider membership help us make this content possible go further and get the guidance that you need to find your bright mobile internet solution so hopefully this has helped you figure out some things and some tips on getting your best cellular data performance and we hope that at your next location you're able to be online as much as you want to be these videos are brought to you by our premium members our mobile internet aficionados they make it possible for us to track this news and create these videos if you like this video please give it a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe to our channel or better yet consider becoming a member yourself

Channel: Mobile Internet Resource Center

Views: 12,285

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Id: oXZ6y4Z24YE

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021