Disclaimer: Waveform provided our pro unit for review at no charge.
Fixed cellular home internet is becoming more and more popular in the US. As traditional ISPs fall behind in speed, pricing, and customer service, and 5G becomes faster and more reliable, it’s making sense for a lot more people to ditch their cable or DSL and go wireless instead.
For comparatively low prices, T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will let you use their networks at whatever speeds they can provide at your location. In many cases, those speeds are significantly faster than existing wired ISPs, too.
It’s not all perfect, though. Wireless is wireless, so it can be unreliable. Your speeds over a cellular connection can be affected by distance, weather, or even trees growing in new leaves. If you’re very close to a tower, the gateway your carrier sends you will probably get a good enough signal, but what if you’re in a rural area, or your home blocks radio waves?
In a non-ideal scenario like those, it’s worth looking into getting an external antenna, so you can get the best signal without having to put the gateway in some weird spot or figure out how to weatherproof it to be outdoors.
Waveform recently launched their new antennas built for 5G Home Internet, and today we’re looking at the new 4×4 flagship, the Quad Pro. At $400 for the full kit, it’s no small chunk of change, but Waveform is hoping that the benefits you’ll get from installing it are worth the cost. What do you get in the kit, and how well does it all work? Let’s find out.
First Impressions
If you go for the all-out bundle at $400, you get quite a bit with your Quad Pro order. You’ll receive the panel antenna itself, of course, but also the Flex Mount (a wall mount with options for rotating the antenna horizontally and vertically), the Window Entry Cable, a 20-foot UltraFlex cable, 4 U.FL-to-SMA adapters, and finally the UltraPole (an optional add-on for the Flex Mount to attach to).
It’s all very neatly packed and labeled, so you know what’s what, and the manuals that come with each accessory tell you exactly how to install them.
Antenna Design
Starting with the antenna, there’s not too much to talk about. It’s a sleek white square with the Waveform logo on the front and a few cables dangling out the bottom. Compared to the old 4×4 antenna model from Waveform, this one is actually a bit smaller and lighter, and the connectors on the cables are SMA instead of N-type.
U.FL Adapters
If you have a gateway that doesn’t come with external antenna ports, this is where the U.FL adapters come in handy. On one end, they have the tiny U.FL connector for attaching to the surface-mount antenna ports inside many devices. On the other are SMA connectors for hooking up to the antenna, Window Entry Cable, or UltraFlex Cable. If your gateway already has external antenna ports, you won’t need these, but it’s nice that they’re included.
UltraPole
The UltraPole is, as the name might imply, a pole. It’s a pretty basic mounting option, and it’s the same one that came with the previous 4×4 antenna model. This might come in handy if you need to get the antenna farther away from a wall or roof, but there’s a good chance you can skip adding it and save $30. From previous experience with the old 4×4 antenna, I can say the pole mount is a little cumbersome and awkward to handle when trying to aim the antenna.
UltraFlex Cables
With their new generation of antennas, Waveform introduced the UltraFlex Cable concept. These cables are male-to-female SMA cables of varying lengths, and are designed to be easier to handle than the SMA-to-N-type cables from before. The whole bundle is noticeably thinner and lighter than the old cable bundle, and they definitely feel more flexible.
When replacing my old 4×4 antenna with the Quad Pro, the UltraFlex bundle was indeed much easier to handle and feed through the wall than the old bundle. Getting the bundle in place to test and align the antenna involved a lot less twisting and fiddling, and coiling up the slack to make things a little neater was simple, even with both ends connected.
It’s worth mentioning that the new cables are more lossy than the old ones. Since they’re thinner and use less material, the RSRP you see in your gateway’s UI may be a few dBm lower than if you’d used the old bundle. However, at least down to a certain point, the RSRP value doesn’t matter too much, and a drop of even 3 or 4 shouldn’t lead to a noticeable change in speeds. In my testing, my speeds with the old 4×4 antenna and old cable bundle were about the same as with the Quad Pro and UltraFlex bundle.
If you’re very far away from the nearest tower, and you really need all the RSRP you can get, it may be worth finding thicker SMA cables, but for most people, the thinner profile should be a welcome change.
Window Entry Cable
One of the new things Waveform is introducing with the Quad Pro is the Window Entry Cable. Previously, if you wanted to install your antenna outside, you’d need to find some way to get a bundle of four antennas through your wall, which usually involved drilling a hole somewhere. Obviously, that’s not ideal, especially if you’re living in a rented space, and made an external antenna impractical for a lot of people.
The Window Entry Cable is a male-to-female SMA adapter that basically just arranges the antenna wires in a flat ribbon so you can run it through a window. The box on each side also has a sticky pad so you can adhere it to the wall and keep it tidy.
Even though I already have a hole in my wall for the antenna cable bundle, I wanted to test the entry cable out. So my initial installation of the Quad Pro involved hooking up my gateway to the entry cable, running it through a window, attaching the UltraFlex bundle to the outside, and then connecting the bundle to the antenna.
Since the entry cable is just a flat wire bundle, it should work in most windows in most situations. In my case, the window I needed to use has a window-unit AC in it, which means I couldn’t just run the cable along the sill and lower the pane on top of it. Instead, I decided to try running it between the AC’s accordion side panel and the side of the window. Unsurprisingly, this worked just fine, and I could pull the side panel all the way to the edge of the window without issues.
Just like with the UltraFlex cable bundle (and any cable bundle), the Window Entry Cable does cause some signal loss. However, just like with the UltraFlex cable bundle, it shouldn’t matter for most people. With or without it, I didn’t notice a difference in speeds.
Flex Mount
Finally, there’s the Flex Mount. Like I mentioned previously, the pole mount can be fiddly to get set up and get adjusted to just the right spot. The Flex Mount is here to make mounting and calibrating a lot easier, and I think it delivers.
Instead of a big metal pole, the Flex Mount is a relatively compact set of three plastic pieces held together by a couple of bolts. The joints are adjustable by loosening the bolts, letting you rotate the antenna 40 degrees left or right, and also 40 degrees up or down. You don’t have to worry about the weight of the antenna during adjustments, either, since there are notches preventing the joints from slipping, and the bolts keep everything together even when they’re loose.
Overall, I think the Flex Mount is huge improvement over the pole mount, with only a few relatively minor disadvantages.
When I went to install the Flex Mount on a wooden wall, I noticed that the bolts it come with are really thick. They do have pointed ends, but I don’t think you’re going to get them into the wall without drilling pilot holes first. For other wall types (like brick or cement), Waveform does say you’ll need to use a drill and wall anchors, but I thought it was worth mentioning that you’ll probably want at least the drill even for wood.
The other minor issue I ran into with the Flex Mount is its length. I have to put my antenna at a pretty steep angle on the wall to properly point at the tower, but because of how compact the Flex Mount is, I can’t really horizontally rotate the antenna as much as I’d like for the best possible signal. It doesn’t seem like the slightly-off angle has affected speeds much, but it could be a problem if you need to mount at the full 40 degrees.
It’s also important to note that if you need to rotate your antenna more than 40 degrees, you’ll probably want to go with the pole mount instead, unless there’s a perpendicular wall available that could work for you. It looks like the only thing really preventing more rotation is the grounding wire, but I haven’t confirmed that.
Test Results
I’ve given a bunch of general notes on my experience with the different parts of the Quad Pro kit, so I think it’s time for some numbers.
Before I compare gateways, let’s talk a bit about the signal loss over the accessories. These aren’t speed test numbers, but signal strength numbers.
As you can see from the numbers above, not too much has changed from the old 4×4 to the Quad Pro. There’s a bit of a dip in LTE signal strength, but seeing as the signal fluctuates all the time, it’s hard to attribute that to the new setup. Removing the Window Entry Cable also didn’t cause much (if any) difference in signal strength.
You can see the lack of effect in these couple speed tests. The first was taken with the Window Entry Cable in place, and the other without it. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a screenshot of a speed test from before the antenna switch-over, but it would’ve been about the same.
With the signal strength between different antenna and cable combinations of out the way, what about if you don’t already have an antenna? Will getting the Quad Pro help you? Probably!
I brought over an Arcadyan KVD21 from another location so I could test a fully contained gateway against using the antennas. The comparisons would probably be a little more valuable if I could get my hands on the Arcadyan TMOG4AR, but this is what I have.
Hooked up to the Quad Pro, I have a GL.iNet GL-X3000 Spitz AX. This is a much more advanced device than what T-Mobile ships out, but I have it configured to connect to the same bands.
Both were on LTE band 2 and 5G band 41. Using the GL.iNet’s more advanced statistics, I know that it was aggregating LTE bands 2, 2, and 66. The Arcadyan was likely doing the same or similar.
As you can see, the Quad Pro gives significantly faster speeds, at least in this test. It’s a little tricky to measure this sort of thing since speeds over cellular can be so variable. But there’s enough of a difference here (at least in download speeds) for me to say the Quad Pro is helping.
Just for reference, this is the signal strength the Arcadyan was getting during that speed test.
Recommendations
Would I recommend getting the Waveform Quad Pro? Definitely! But also not always.
It’s a well-made piece of hardware, and comes with a bunch of useful accessories (and Waveform is always willing to help with any questions or issues). An external antenna also definitely improved my speeds at least. That being said, I don’t think a $400 antenna for cellular home internet is for everyone.
If your cellular gateway is doing fine as-is, there’s not much reason to spend another $400 on something that might not help. And if you already have the old 4×4 antenna kit installed, the Quad Pro is probably not going to be much of an improvement.
However, if you’ve been wanting to get better signal from your gateway for any reason and you know it’s possible, the Quad Pro could be worth it as long as you have somewhere to mount it outside. Maybe you live in a house with metal siding and metal screens in all the windows, making it difficult to get a signal indoors. Maybe you’re on the edge of a coverage area and want cellular internet as a backup to cable, DSL, or fiber. Or maybe you were already looking into the old 4×4 antenna but having to drill a hole in the wall put you off.
In any of those cases, I’d say the Waveform Quad Pro is a worthy purchase. It’s pretty easy to install, comes with pretty much everything you need to get it set up even with a gateway with no external antenna ports, and Waveform can help you with any more specific issues you run into. You can call, email, or even text for personalized support and advice on your installation (they straight up include a number to text in the packaging!)
If you’re interested in purchasing the new Quad Pro, you can use our link below and save 5% at checkout with code TMOREPORT.
If mounting an antenna outdoors isn’t an option for you, or $400 is too much to spend, Waveform does have an option for you too: the Quad Mini. Stay tuned for the review on that coming soon!
