Which 5G Router is best for use with an external 5G Antenna?

The Best 5G Router for use with external antennas

If you need a 5G Router with embedded 5G modem and SIM slot for your home, office or M2M / IoT remote management and monitoring application and know that the cellular 5G signal indoors is poor, or in fact only receive LTE / 4G signal indoors, but the signal outdoors is strong then you will probably want to install an outdoor 5G antenna.

So Which 5G Router is the best choice for using with an external 5G antenna?

The first thing to consider is whether the 5G router has external antenna connectors.  For example the Huawei 5G CPE PRO 3 router does not have any external antenna connections.  You can send these off and pay£150 to £200 for them to be converted to have 4×4 MiMo antenna connectors installed, but you may as well spend the extra money just buying a 5G router that already has the external antenna connections.

The second thing to consider is the number of external antenna connections.  Many 5G routers, such as the Zyxel NR5101 will have just two external antenna connectors, however the 5G modem installed in the router will actually use four antennas, but the manufacturers only provide 2 x external antenna connections for 5G, so in this scenario you are not getting the optimum performance from your 5G router.  Whist this type of router will work very well with a 2×2 MiMo 5G antenna and will work if your router is in a poor signal location, but the antenna is outdoors with a strong signal it will not be giving you your best 5G Internet connection in terms of data throughput and stability.

Therefore, the optimum solution would be to have a 5G router with 4×4 MiMo external antenna connections.  Whilst some home and office 5G routers feature this, such as the EE 5G Router (Zyxel NR5103) these have TS9 antenna connections, whilst most 4×4 MiMo 5G Antennas will have SMA antenna connections so you will require TS9 to SMA adapters which will add extra cost and provide an extra element of leakage in the signal through the added antenna connections.

So the best 5G router would have 4 x SMA antenna connections for 5G and these could connect directly to your 4×4 MiMo 5G antenna without the use of antenna adapters.  We recommend the RAPID NR550 5G Router which will provide reliable, secure, high speed 5G Internet connectivity, especially when used with an outdoor 4×4 MiMo 5G Antenna.