Wireless Joint

Jim S. wrote: Sat Dec 22, 2018 7:08 am I did in fact lock the modem to band 2 last night. It seems to now stay on the closer towers 99% of the time, but still has jumped to the distant tower at least once.

(As an aside, I've also seen it pick up the distant tower on band 30, which in theory should have, relative to band 12 or even 2, almost no ability to penetrate trees, weather, or buildings! Also, my phone picks up band 2 rather than band 12 at work inside a large building. I can only guess that AT&T is pushing more power on the bands with less penetrating ability. I wonder if there is any hard data on this published anywhere...)

I haven't tested the setup outside with AT&T since the weather hasn't been very pleasant, but shortly after I bought it I tested it outside with Sprint and found that it did no better (on band 25, just above band 2) than inside. (It also performed no better than my Sprint hotspot, as I've seen other people complain about on this forum...)

There is one bit of data I've noticed with the setup that puzzles me. I had mainly been checking my signal stats with the status.html page available from the router's welcome page. When it's connected to the distant tower, with the much poorer throughput, the CSQ, RSRP, and RSRQ are all worse than the nearer towers, as expected. However, if I go to the modem debug screen and look at the output of at!gstatus, I see that the distant tower has a much higher and steadier SINR than the nearby towers! I'm assuming that the modem is abandoning the nearby towers when the SINR goes too low for too long (due to traffic, trees moving in the wind, or whatever) but I don't know why I'm getting much lower throughput with a much higher SINR. Do the towers perhaps broadcast two different modulation schemes simultaneously, a more complex one for high signal levels and a simpler one for low signal levels? That's the only explanation I can think of.

Jim S. wrote: Sat Dec 22, 2018 4:50 pm I don't have time for a detailed reply, but I'm getting the tower information by taking the eNB ID from the status screen (I don't know what command to use to get this, it doesn't seem to show up in the gstatus output) and plugging it in on cellmapper.net. (The tower locations there are crowdsourced, I think, but generally accurate.)

oma215 wrote: Mon Dec 31, 2018 8:10 pm Hi can any one tell me how to lock my we826-t to band 2 I also have the AT&T plan

AT!ENTERCND="A710"
AT!BAND=10,"B2 (1900)",0,0000000000000002
AT!BAND=10
AT!RESET

To unlock just do:

AT!ENTERCND="A710"
AT!BAND=00
AT!RESET

Jim S. wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 10:44 am You shouldn't need to unplug the power, but every time I've changed bands I've had to reset the router, not the modem, to reestablish internet traffic even though the modem was connected to the tower. No idea why. I originally thought it was a Sprint thing but it happens with AT&T too.

Jim S. wrote: Wed Jan 02, 2019 6:54 pm Since I set it to not use band 30 it's been behaving as expected. Only problem is that I'm over the 22-gig mark and getting deprioritized a lot til my next month starts. The previous month I was also over 22 gig early and didn't notice it at all. I suppose a bunch of people got new phones for Christmas...

Someday when I'm home alone I'm going to plug the modem into a long extension cord (to avoid the ridiculous boot and connection time) and look for spots in the house with more signal strength. I probably won't bother trying it outside until I see how it behaves when the trees are well-sprouted.

LilAkka wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:38 pm I think I might be having a similar issue. How did you know what band to lock to?