Set band switching priority for MC8805

[palikacska]

I have a Sierra Wireless MC8805, using it on a 3G HSPA+ network. Recently I had problems with a nearby cell in the B8 (900MHz) band. It always had slow download (10Mbit/s) and upload speeds (less than 1Mbit/s), also uploading anything crippled download speeds (to around 1Mbit/s). I successfully worked it around by disabling B8 by creating a custom GW band mask with the AT!BAND command. Since then I have 2x-3x faster downloads (30Mbit/s) and a full-speed upload (5Mbit/s) and uploading anything doesn't effect download speeds at all. So far so good.

One side effect of this workaround is however that I will only have GPRS/EDGE if I go to the country, out of my town as there are only B8 cells on 3G. Of course I can make a script to manually enable/disable B8 on the go but I still find this a nasty hack and looking for more sophisticated solutions.

One of them would be telling my MC8805 somehow to use only B1 cells if they're present and use B8 only if B1 cells are absent. I have found this setting for MC7455 but I'm not sure it works at all on MC8805 and don't have a Windows installation right now to get a QPST EFS Explorer working and try it out.

So I'm looking for a modem AT/QMI/MBIM command or any other way of setting band preference order (or priority) on my MC8805. I want it to register to cells on B1 even if they have a worse signal reception than B8 cells. Only in case there are no B1 cells available should it register to a cell in B8. Is there any way to make the modem do this automatically?