The internal antenna is barely worse. I don’t think it’s the Mifi, though. I think it’s the modem.
I bought this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGCSPEA
It came in today, so I fooled around with the LTE modem.
I pulled the EC25-A out of the Mifi, and put it in that USB adapter with the same SIM (had to use a SIM adapter, it wants a full size SIM, so I had to fiddle with it), but after that it worked fine. Windows drivers are in this package (warning, large file).
http://www.quectel.com/Qdownload/EC25.zip
After it was installed, I ran the same speed tests. Not really any difference from the Mifi. Now, I don’t know what the gain is for the antennas that came with that adapter…or if those antennas even do 700Mhz. For all I know they are Wifi antennas. The kit came with RP-SMA connections, and my 5dbi oar antennas are SMA, so I couldn’t swap them out. I’m not convinced it would make that much of a difference, though.
So, right now, to me, either AT&T is throttling the EC-25A (and other non-ATT modems), or there is a driver issue that is present in Linux and Windows, or there is a default configuration with the drivers that’s limiting performance.
I have hit 30mbps upload and download a few times with the EC-25A. But it’s only happened about half a dozen times total. One of those was today in Windows connected to a VyprVPN server. I couldn’t recreate it. Most of the tests settle around +/- 15mbps down and +/-10mbps up, regardless of being in the Mifi, or in this adapter, or connected to a VPN. There are spikes into the high 20s on both up and down connections, but it’s rare.
So, from the looks of it, the Mifi’s board isn’t the bottleneck. I also don’t believe the internal antenna is limiting the performance that much. The oar antennas are maybe 10% faster on average, and they are cumbersome.
I think something else is going on with the EC-25A specifically. I hope it’s a configuration issue so we can open it up.
