TL:DR are the LTE routers appropriate for home users?
Hi, first off sorry if this should not be in the RouterOS section but I didn't "Articles for beginners" was right either.
Yesterday I didn't know the company Mikrotik existed but today I want to buy half the hardware I see. I want to get a LTE (CAT7 or above) router and access point for my holiday house. I am especially in love with this https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_lte18 but I can't quite justify it. My concern is that I need to learn RouterOS and spend a lot of time tweaking settings, when I just need it to work every day.

Currently I use a no-brand 5G router. I use Home Assistant to control heating remotely, which is critical at winter. It has LTE CAT19 and I did some 4G speed tests and got upwards of 250DL, 90UL speeds.

The dream setup would be a LTE modem with PoE, a small router and an AP. So each component can be upgraded. Or should I give up and get the Chateau LTE12 or Chateau LTE18 ax.

Don't hurry.
Get a low level device first and learn. Like ax lite lte or so.

Then see where you want to go. If it's not for you, no major losses.

ax lite lte…If it's not for you, no major losses.

Those can also be pressed into a number of auxiliary uses like travel routers, spare hubs, media converters, etc. if the primary use case falls through.

If the initial experiment does end up working out, it can be a second AP.

The main risk is the "in a hurry" bit. Starting from zero, the only way you're going to end up with a working configuration with very little time invested in learning is to stick strictly to the default configuration. Once you go "off-roading," the path back to stable roads can take months to find. RouterOS is one of those tools where the limit on what you can do with it has more to do with how much study and creativity you put into the endeavor, not with limitations of the hardware or software.

The main consequence is, there are precious few "just make it work" checkboxes.

Let me explain my motivations. I want to support a "local" brand (Teltonika was my only alternative) and I need an LTE modem + router + wifi within 30 days. I can live with any second hand router to begin width, so my main focus is the modem. I have a cell tower within 200 meters of the house so that is why the high-gain antenna is probably overkill. I won't have time to learn RouterOS, with kids and everyday life taking priority.

If you don't have time to learn then maybe Mikrotik isn't for you. There are lot of brands that sell more user friendlier modems, for eg in Croatia T-Com sells Xiaomi 5G routers that are quite nice and they have good performance.

Huawei also have good LTE modems so maybe this is a way to go in your case. Being only 200 meter from cell tower is a great thing and any LTE router should be fine in your case.

Ah but I don't want to get a chinese brand I'm comfortable with the bash terminal so maybe my learning curve won't be too steep.
I might be my own worst enemy here.

I won't have time to learn RouterOS, with kids and everyday life taking priority.

Been there, done that, yet took my time.

You can not have it all.
You need to prioritize and be creative with how you use your time.

I had (OK, technically still have... somewhere in a box probably) a Chateau LTE12. Reasons: lived in an area with nothing but 4G/LTE internet available, didn't want an ISP device I couldn't control, and didn't want anything Chinese.

Quickset on the Chateau did a great job, it was all plug & play. The only thing I needed to do was lock it to a certain tower with AT commands because otherwise it would occasionally flipflap between two that were equally bad and I'd lose connection many times per day. When it rained, I locked it to another tower

I knew nothing about networks and routers and I got it working. Yes, children and everyday life included.

I still know nothing, but now I have a combo of RB5009+ax3+Audience that even has CAPsMAN working. One day I'll even figure out VLANs. Maybe. The Audience is a problem now.

I'd recommend you try the hAP ax lite LTE6, like tangent said. It's very cheap, it'll do the job since you're close to the tower, and if it doesn't, then you can find another use for it somewhere, somehow. (Unless it's an old Chateau. What the hell do I do with that thing?!)

...One day I'll even figure out VLANs. Maybe.........

Don't go that devil's way

Technically I still have a few years to figure it out. Once my kid grows up and gets his own devices with internet access, I don't want them anywhere near the rest of my network

...One day I'll even figure out VLANs. Maybe.........

Don't go that devil's way

No, devil's way would be start messing with CAPsMAN


@OP


I have a small child (8 months old) but that doesn't stop me to tinker with RouterOS. Honestly any Mikrotik 5G/LTE device will work out of the box with it's default settings. Then in your free time you can learn RouterOS little by little. As@holvoetn said you need to be creative with your time. If there is a will there is a way and time to learn.

No, devil's way would be start messing with CAPsMAN

+1

No, devil's way would be start messing with CAPsMAN

+1

It still eludes me how you can be so skilled using VLAN (even spotting errors simply reading snippets of code) but struggle with capsman.
Really.

Simple, I have not wasted anytime learning it. I am waiting for the continual changes in MTs approach to wifi slow down and become consistent and stable, and then I may elect to play.
MT wifi has no effect on my simply working from day one TP Link APs. My frustration is that capsman interferes with vlan setups and that is enough for me to throw up.
If it was implemented logically and simply, then it may have an appeal.
For me attempting to put a basic wifi setup on a hapax3 is a friggen pita. That is my litmus test. When that becomes more intuitive, and logical instead of stabs in the dark, lucky guesses and removes so much overlap/ duplication and unknown functionality relationships and visual indications,............. its a mess.

However, if you want to do some training sessions with me, I wouldnt be adverse to some enlightenment LOL.

I went for the Chateau LTE18 ax. A setup with LTE modem dish + router + accesspoint is complete overkill for my needs, however much I would love to do it. But I have a month to tinker and play with the settings. After checking out the mikrotik youtube channel I got some inspirations. Could be fun to do a pihole setup that my wife cannot unplug XD
Also playing with the settings for locking to a cell tower, setting up guest networks, setting up triggers with text messages (apparently it can do that too!). You will hear from me again.

There is no need for PiHole, you can use router itself to do that and add blacklists to the router itself.

The device arrived, yey!
But somethings is wrong.
The LTE speeds on the LTE18 AX is much slower than on my phone. Tested with two different SIM cards on speedtest.net. The phone easily does 162 Mbps DL, but the router manages just 12 Mbps.
The two devices are in the exact same location, and I use an ethernet cable to run speedtest against the router, so wifi is not a bottleneck.
Updated the firmware on router and modem.

Time to post your config:
viewtopic.php?t=203686#p1051720

Thanks for your time jaclaz.
I'm gonna look like a total idiot now, but I spent an hour last night testing measuring, staring at the router.This morning I just PICKED IT UP, rotated it 90, put back down exactly in the same place,
an voilat, all LTE signal indicators became perfect. A wave of green bars rolled across the user interface.
RSSI, RSRP, SINR, RSRQ are all in the "excellent" category now, after being poor.

I repeat, I just tilted the router a bit, and like magic the signal improved. My first speed test shows 341 up, 60 down 22 ping. Perhaps the best test core of all my recent attempts.

PS. The exported config gives a good overview of the settings so I will read through it.

I was too fast to celebrate. The signal quality is back down. I read some other guy on the forum had to force his router to use a specific cell tower, so I'm gonna read the docs on that.

LTE is fun, isn't it ?

My phone has spoiled me with it's ease of use

That's why I opted for ATL18 Just point and shoot

You will have to experiment...

Things to keep in mind:

1) First and foremost - telecoms REALLY REALLY like to prioritize and shape traffic and give phone users better speeds at the expense of non-phone users -- or the exact opposite, if they have a lot of home LTE customers. One of the ways to try and deal with that is firewall postrouting mangle, in which you might want to to try TTL values 64 and up. Thankfully Mikrotik allows you to mangle TTL, which is why you bought it.

2) There are bands. Phones may prefer a certain band and they may all attach to, say, band 20, on which the band gets saturated and traffic is slow, but another band like 5 may be very much device-free and give you better speeds because the tower's uplink has bandwidth to spare; or the telecom allocated more bandwidth for band 5. Thankfully Mikrotik allows you to lock bands, which is why you bought it.

3) A stronger signal does not necessarily mean higher speeds. There might be a tower smack middle of a residential area with a zillion devices connected to it, you might get excellent signal quality, but speeds are just crap because so many people use it. There might also be a tower in the woods 5 km away that gives you low-to-medium-yellow-orange signal bars, but it's almost free from devices and has ample bandwidth available. Thankfully Mikrotik allows you to lock cell towers, which is why you bought it.

4) Expect speed dips and peaks based on the time of day and day of the week. In my case when I had the Chateau running, I could have been living in a sealed box and would have been able to tell you if people just came home from work, if it's 3 AM, if it's a regular weekend or one that has a Friday or Monday holiday attached to it, or if it's Winter/Summer school vacation time. Sadly Mikrotik doesn't allow you to forcibly remove people from an area, it's crime against humanity.

You will find a solution (or multiple solutions) that work best, no worries. Just use the console for AT commands so you can change things quicker than through winbox/webfig GUI.

Hehe those are some good pointers. I just so happen to know a few AT command from working with a Teltonika modem.
I live right next to a cell tower in a small costal town. It will be very interesting to see what happens to performance when the tourists season starts.

Before I start tinkering with the settings I want to ask if it is reasonable that I can actually get better performance than the algorithms that automatically set these things... I trust that Mikrotok knows better than I.

Nope. You'll have to try multiple towers and bands yourself.

@Stopwatch9 also check LTE connection latency grade on https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat.
My experience related to LTE latency since I'm also connecting to internet over LTE 4G but with much worse signal (1.3km from cell in urban area with many devices around) where having max. 120Mb/s in the middle of the night, mostly at day speed varies from 30-60Mb/s, is that latency was sometimes above 1s which is terrible. I had to create QoS scheduler script which adapts Queue Tree records (I have many fq-codel queue type records in tree for upload and download for marked packets in mangle) to set max limit on parent queues (different for upload and download) and for childs in ratio between current child's limit value and parent queue limit, depending on hour in a day, it is not adjusting every hour, several times in the day, eg. part of script how is set:
I performed speed tests multiple times in a day to measure bandwidth depending on signal and network load at certain time and set to some lower value in script for max limit so that queue can always reach set limit, this is compromise between having max. speed at current time or having less latency.
This setup is complex workaround and it is not ideal, but since on ROS we don't have queue type which can handle variating bandwidth properly, I can't see other ways to have good latency at any time in a day with such bandwidth differences.
Now I have A or B grade when measuring latency over LTE at some lower speeds that it can possibly reach, but is fine for me, latency was more issue for me due to video calls/meetings/streaming, desktop sharing and working on remote desktops.