"Wifi router" with external antenna outside Nakuru

[David Sweden]

My family live in "mile Tisa" outside Nakuru and we want to set up wifi that works well even with HD video and preferably 5G. We have fair coverage with Safaricom on a smartphone but not good enough for HD video if indoors antenna, and they only sell routers with built-in antenna it seems. Airtel have poor coverage but sell proper hardware. Faiba has only 4G.

Safaricom has very crappy support. If visiting their stores they try to sell one of their indoors antenna routers. If emailing them they respond with a link to their web page.

We could test some setup with Safaricom, but I'd like to test something I have reason to belive works, especially since no one in Nakuru seems to sell the hardware so we need to buy it from Nairobi or outside Kenya.

We want an indoors combined router/modem for 5G and wifi6 that supports 2 MIMO antennas via SMA connectors.

I identified TP-Link Deco X50-5G V2 AX3000 as a good candidate. But a bit pricey.

Or maybe something from Jumia.com.ng?

ChapGPT agrees with me: "The best approach is to get an unlocked 4G/5G CPE that has proper SMA/TS-9 antenna connectors, put your Safaricom SIM in it, and use a directional MIMO antenna outside. The main thing to check is that it supports the Safaricom LTE/5G bands."

So unless I find support I guess I will try to identify a router that "supports the Safaricom LTE/5G bands", as soon as I know which bands that is.

 

[David Sweden]

I tried it extensively myself now with Deco X50-5G. For anyone reading this I recommend Starlink, it has a higher starting price but then 4000 KES/month while Safaricom's cheapest is 3000 KES/m but you might think that's a bit slow and the 2nd cheapest is 4000 KES. And regarding Deco it is the modern melody set by Apple: Either it works in 5 minutes for dummies or you are in hell: No existing user's manual for the V3 version, nearly impossible to identify which hardware version you have (I had to download ALL installation files and compare release date & number...) and what happens if you try to start it with an iphone is that a white page pops up for one minute (Apple's way of "phoning home" to test if internet works) then a popup says failed to connect to Deco.. instead of saying the SIM card is blocked.