Earlier this year I bought an AT&T IFWA-40 Wireless Hotspot to use at home and on the road. Where I live, my max wired DSL speed is about 7Mbs download and around 756Kbs upload speed...pitiful, I know. The problem is I'm a long way from the nearest AT&T hub and that's the best they can do over copper at the distance I am. I often can see much higher speeds using my iPhone as a hotspot, but it's not consistent...typically 1-3 bars LTE, but often drops back to 4G. Obviously, I'm not in a great cell location either...I'm in a shallow valley between a couple ridges, so no direct line of sight to any towers. I mile away, as the crow flies, I can get 5 bars and be golden.
With the IFWA-40 by itself using the internal antennas, I could reliably see U/D speeds of 10-12Mbs down and 1-2+Mbs up...an improvement, but not exactly setting the world on fire. Next step was an omnidirectional, 10db gain antenna that I mounted on a 10' pole above the roof level...marginal improvement, but not what I'm looking for. The next step was a Wilson Wide-band directional Yagi antenna and that did the trick once I got it accurately pointed at the optimum tower. Now I can see consistent downloads between 15 and 50Mbs and uploads between 3 and 12Mbs with it inside the attic. To keep the RF cable runs short, I mount the hotspot and the antenna in the attic. Very easy to lose all your signal with a long antenna cable run. The IFWA-40 has a Gig Ethernet port on it if you want to connect it to a wired network router and that's something I use in my home between my photo/video editing machines and NAS devices.
When I travel, I mount the Yagi antenna on a pole that I attach to the ladder on my Lance truck camper and orient as needed. Total cost was $200 for the hotspot and $90 for the Yagi antenna and a 10' cable. For $50/month, I get 50GB of data usage and I also get a phone number associated with the hot spot...the hotspot has a telephone jack on it for a wired telephone. I went round and round with AT&T about that because they charge you $10/month for the phone service, which I don't use...it's part of the $50/month. There is no way that they'll take it off and I suspect they can't due to some FCC rules about providing internet service alone in areas that AT&T doesn't normally serve with Fiber, cable or copper. If you need more data, you can upgrade to 100GB/month for an additional $50/month. At least that's the latest pricing as of a month or so ago.
With this setup I can consistently get signal where my phone alone is pretty much useless for anything other than text. If the phone is consistently showing "no service", though, not likely this system will help. Part number on the Wilson antenna is WA314411. I would not bother with the omnidirectional antenna unless you just need a minimal improvement. Also, the IFWA-40 has dual antenna inputs (I'm only using one at the moment), so you can set up a dual antenna MIMO configuration, but I can't comment on how much good that might do. There are also some high-gain antennas that you can mount directly to the hotspot, but I decided to skip over that option from the get go.
Cheers!
