New tower, better signal, worse bandwidth...

[Hoosier1]

In summary, I live in a rural area, I had used At&T ZTE Z700A to connect LTE to my home network, worked well, I could average about 20MB down with peaks as high as 75mb. Life was not good, but acceptable.

New tower goes up less than a mile away, connection goes to crap, so I upgrade my LTE modems to AT&T ZTE MF279, still poor connection but better, so throw on to exterior Yaggis. Connection signal is great, -83db, but band width sucks.. I now average 8MB down, with peaks around 18MB. and more people must be getting on the LTE modem kick, because at night I'm lucky to see 5MB down, usually much worse.

Now, when I first boot up the MF279 it initally attaches to a more distant tower, it seems, signal strength is around -109, but the bandwidth is 20MB - 30MB down on average. but shortly after boot up it hops to the new tower and I'm in crappy internet world.

Now I'm searching for a way to to have a router that will attach to the more distant tower, and not hop to the new closer tower, Is their a DIY router approach I could take to achieve this? I'm thinking band locking is what I need, does that sound right?

Thanks for any insight.

[thejohnfist]

It sounds like the new tower doesn't have the backend bandwidth that the more distant tower has. You can do band locking on many DIY or even prepackaged router/modems.

If the new tower isn't in the same direction as the old one, yagi antenna(s) would likely fix this problem. If they are, then it's tricky. I'm not sure if there's a way to PCI Lock. PCI (I don't know what it stands for) numbers correspond to specific broadcasting hardware on each tower. There's usually not identical number PCI units within range of each other, so if you could figure out how to PCI lock a device, then go to the tower you want and gather the PCI data, it would be possible.

Also - 20mbps to 75mbps isn't too shabby. Especially if you're not getting MIMO.

[Hoosier1]

Thanks for the feed back, I assumed the new tower does not have the same backhaul as the distant one, the distant tower is located in an area with Fiber, the new tower close to me I suspect is using an RF backhaul. The more distant tower is in the same general direction as the new closer tower, that will be a problem to overcome, I think a personal tower may be in my future to get up my Yagis high enough to try towers in other directions. But given the MF279 does initially seem to connect to the more distant tower, I'm hoping its that the more distant tower may have a different band than the closer one. Not even sure if that's possible, I'm pretty new to this level of LTE understanding.

Also - 20mbps to 75mbps isn't too shabby. Especially if you're not getting MIMO.

I agree 25 - 75 was not shabby, and very usable, but I moved here from a place with Fiber to the house so I was very spoiled.

[thejohnfist]

Ah yes, fiber would spoil someone no doubt.

Band locking would be the easiest solution, if it works out that way. If not, maybe you'll be lucky enough that one tower is far enough aside from the other in your view that you could exclude one using yagis or some other narrow directional antenna.

[swwifty]

can you share you output of the at command at!gstatus?

That will help troubleshoot.

Also, is your -83dbm the RSSI or RSRP?

[Hoosier1]

can you share you output of the at command at!gstatus?

That will help troubleshoot.

Also, is your -83dbm the RSSI or RSRP?

The MF279 has a very Simple web interface, I don't know how to give an AT command to it., if you are familiar with it and can share I'll give it a try. There is only one field on the about page that shows signal strength it does not indicate if it is RSSI or RSRP.

Thanks

[swwifty]

The MF279 has a very Simple web interface, I don't know how to give an AT command to it., if you are familiar with it and can share I'll give it a try. There is only one field on the about page that shows signal strength it does not indicate if it is RSSI or RSRP.

Thanks

Unfortunately I don't, maybe someone else does?