NETGEAR 4G LTE Broadband Modem (LM1200) – Use LTE as a Primary Internet Connection | Certified with AT&T, T-Mobile & Verizon

So first I'm fully off grid out here, the nearest utility is a mile or more down the road and that's just power and a phone line. Everything I have comes through an larger/upgraded antenna whether it be TV, FM, LTE, ham radio. So I know an thing or too about how to get the most out of the signals in the air around you. Pros: Price Wall mountable(86mm hole spacing) Small Easy web interface Easy setup External ant ports if needed Cons: -Uses USB C as a power source. (Needs a wall adapter vice a normal 12volt source like most routers and my booster, ideally I would wire it directly to my campers 12 volt system which remains powered if ACpower to the camper is lost.) -Internal antenna doesn't do well in low signal environments. -you must connect directly to it via Ethernet to view the settings menu on a computer. Can't connect from PC>router>lm1200. Has to be PC>LM1200 It just happened that I was on a hill that can just about get decent service from band 13 LTE on a tower 5km away from me even know the cell tower antenna barely faces my direction. So I got a booster that can boost that band. All good. Great useable speed from my phones hotspot buuuttt I needed a wired connection, I wanted Ethernet for some equipment I have so enter the lm1200 Netgear cell booster. Very cheap at 110 dollars. Picked it up from an Amazon locker in town and walked right into Verizon store without even taking it out of the box. They scanned the IMEI number and confirmed that they could probably set up a SIM card even though he had no idea what I had in my hand and had never done it before. Probably 5 minutes later we were powering up the unit with a new SIM card and it was online 2 minutes later after initializing a connection. I ran home and powered it back up and bam, connected to cell tower(via my booster) and I ran a temp line directly to my PC and it worked perfect. Pings range from 40-100ms for me so you ain't gonna game on this bad boy but anything else not time sensitive will do fine. So in my video you see I run it into a normal wifi router, this allows me to have multiple ethernet ports for multiple things and it allows me to have both a 2.4 and 5.0 Wi-Fi band like a standard household would, which allows visitors without cell service to still connect to something. The same thing that you would do if you went to a friend's house and you didn't have cell phone service. So my first impression is that the internal antenna of the LM 1200 is fairly terrible because I can only get up to around 10 megabytes per second when testing(in my signal environment), I thought about getting a splitter and connecting the TS9 ports on the back of this directly to the same antenna that my cell phone booster uses, but I'm willing to try the $7 whip antennas you can buy for this that just plug right into the back and I'll update this and let you know how much speed I get just by adding those two little whip antennas. If those don't work, they sell a coax type f to ts-9 splitter that I can use to connect this lm1200 directly to my cell phone booster antenna you see in my video. So the data for the nerdy people: -I can get near full bars which means -70db signal on my pixel 6 when located at the same spot as this product and this product gets 70 db(viewed on the web portal) - With my cell booster OFF, I get about -115db on my phone and -115 on this device. -So the cheap Amazon booster works great when set up properly even with stock antennas. That translated to about 20-30 down and 5-10 up on my phone using the boosted LTE. -BUT when doing speed test on my computer when using this product I only get around 6 down and 2-5 up at the time of testing These speeds change with network/tower traffic of course but I think its interesting that the speeds can be so different from 2 devices that are using the same carrier and cell band and have about the same signal strength so I'm going to call my carrier and present this data as i suspect they are messing with my speeds. Other details, 70 bucks added on my bill for this extra "line" and 150gb of data...

A superb, tiny box. I was originally concerned it had no external antennas but on actual use the signal reception was excellent despite being placed in the basement. I did try adding external antennas to the available TS9 ports but the antennas added nothing, if anything, they made the signal worse. My ISP is Fizz on a nano SIM. I inserted it and powered on. Waited about 30 secs and i was connected to the net. Oddly i didnt have to do any APN setup but then for no reason 3 days later when accessing a web page i was redirected to the modem's web ui. Apparently now i had to enter Fizz's APN details. In my case it was a single line: APN: mobile.bm

Verizon disconnected my previous device, their own, a T1114V when they shut down 3G, even though that device was 4G, but that is another story. I needed a replacement, after spending hours with Customer support, I found they had nothing to offer that they sold. Finally, one said this device would work, even though it is not Verizon, but is compatible to their network. I got a sim card from them, inserted into the LM1300 and it connected to Verizon's network. I used the supplied ethernet cable and it worked on my laptop. The speeds were around 60 MBS, which is excellent for 4G cellular. I then hooked the same cable to a router, I used a Netgear 1750. This gave me 4 LAN ports and transmitted wireless in both 2.4 and 5.0 GHZ. I hooked up several cameras, both wired and wireless, docking stations for laptops, and a thermostat. I have used it for several days and it has worked well. The LM1300 is the same as the LM1200 but sold by Cosco. The box was sealed and did say it was compatible to Verizon. Understand that this device is a modem, it will allow you to get internet through the LAN port to another ethernet port such as on a computer, but if you want wireless capabilities. you need to add a router.

(Updated) We planned to use this cell modem seasonally so we can cancel the expensive broadband service and still monitor our climate control and cameras. The LM1300 specs are perfect for this purpose. We tried this on Google Fi for which we have great phone reception. We ordered a Google Fi sim and setup up a Google Fi APN per instructions. It would not connect even after soliciting support from both Google Fi and Netgear which confirmed Google Fi is not a supported network. We ordered a T-Mobile sim card ($10) with the minimum T-Mobile prepaid plan ($10). T-Mobile support was incredibly helpful in activating the sim, configuring the modem, and establishing our account. The connection via Ethernet cable to our laptop fired up immediately. The failover feature (cell backup when broadband not available) was configured without issues (BB modem to LM1300 and LM1300 to TP-Link WiFi router); however it failed live testing. After spending 3+- hours on the phone with Netgear support reviewing and testing various connections, nothing has worked and, I have given up. Downgrade from 5 stars to 1 star and the LM1300 is going back within the 30 day return period. One more point. Standard Netgear support is 3 months. We purchased the LM1300 with 1 year of tech support but were unsuccessful in getting Netgear to honor the extended support even after submitting Amazon purchase documentation.

Totally plug and play. This shouldn’t be your your primary router. It’s router features are super slim and basic. You use this in bridge mode to act as modem to connect to Bell (or Rogers) 4G for cell internet when needed during an outage of your wired (fiber, dsl or cable). You want a carrier for 4G that is different than your wired ISP. It’s a fantastic hot standby and automatic failover solution if your wired internet goes down. Or your house fiber, phone line or cable line is cut. Imagine voip, wifi, TVs, security, voice assistants, alarms, house automation all working when main internet goes down. It’s a whole house internet backup solution. Super simple to setup - get a nano sim card and ask your cell data provider to unlock it and register the IEMI # of this modem and 5 mins later you are online. You configure it with a PC via an Ethernet cable to the modem. You then connect it your primary router’s spare Ethernet jacks (that you designate as wan fail over in your router setup). You need a router that has WAN failover and preferably failback like many Asus routers. Failover is about 30 seconds and automatic once your primary internet goes offline. Nothing in your house will notice the difference - no rebooting of anything or trying to hotspot to your phone in an outage. Failback on your primary router watches for your wired internet to come back online and auto switch back to avoid costly cell data charges. Failback also happens in 30 seconds or less. This modem also has sms alerts to your phone to let you know you are on backup internet and alerts when data exceeds a set threshold. This plus notifications from your 4G provider that require exception approvals protect you from surprise high cell data bills. In standby mode, a router like Asus sends no data over the lan Ethernet cable to this modem So zero data charges, means you can get a basic $10/mth standby package for 4G online backup. (It will also hunt for 3G if no 4G but those speeds aren’t really useable - so set it to hunt for 4G only). (An Asus primary router could also use this in an actIve wan load sharing mode to increase bandwidth- but that would be super expensive data charges). Speed on this for about a 2 bar reception to cell tower is 50-70 Mbs down and 15 MBs up. There are jacks for extra antennas that don’t make much of a difference unless you put the remote antenna outside. When’s it’s in failover mode, you can logon onto to the admin interface from any lan device or phone to see real time data bandwidth downloaded. Monthly testing is as simple as unplugging the wan Ethernet cable to your wired internet modem from your router.