In my earlier post I tried some popular cheap Antennas on the Boosteven R281 modem but unfortunately, all of them are incompatible with the modem. However, these antennas are working fine with my Globe CAT7 modem and now we'll see how each one performs and if they are worth your time and money.
First thing in buying antennas for your prepaid wifis, is to make sure that you have the right connector. For most of the available prepaid wifis today, the external antenna ports are SMA. I'll be using the Globe CAT7 modem and we'll check the speeds on each available band. Please note that for this modem, admin access is required for you to switch from internal antenna to external antenna.
Another thing to consider is the cell tower nearest you. You can go to cellmapper.net to check on the location of cell towers in your area. You can then direct the antennas towards that cell tower.
First antenna to try is this duck antenna, one of the most common antennas available online. These are the same antennas you find on most Huawei routers. I got this for Php75 each from Lazada for a total of Php150 for the two antennas.
On all 3 bands, the antenna failed to improve on both download and upload speed but improved ping times on band 3 and 41.
Another popular external antenna for prepaid wifis is this omni directional antenna with magnetic base. I got this one for Php115 again from Lazada. So let's see if it helps my internet speed.
Similar to the first antenna, this omni directional antenna failed to improve download speeds but has faster pings on band 28 and 41 as well as a very slight bump on the upload speed.
Next antenna I'll try is this small 28dbi 4G antenna. This is a bit more expensive than the first two antennas, I bought this antenna for Php215 from Lazada.
Last antenna to try is this cheap MIMO Antenna I got from shopee for Php587 pesos. This is expensive compared to the first 3 antennas we've tried but it's cheaper than the Globe MIMO antennas for sale online where the cheapest I saw was Php1,200.
Again ping times were significantly faster on all bands and the download and upload speeds on bands 3 and 41 are faster than the built-in internal antenna. However on band 28, you can see that both download and upload speeds became slower.
To summarize, these antennas seem to improve ping times compared to the internal antenna of the Globe CAT7 modem and in terms of speed, the small 4G panel antenna and the 4G MIMO antenna seems to give you faster download and upload speeds but only on bands 3 and 41. If you will be using Band 28, then these antennas will be useless to you.
