Wireless Joint

Hey everyone,

I've been working on my first LTE router build over the last week or so. Wireless Joint has lots of great information. Pretty sure I've been over almost every thread that involves the EM160. I have a Verizon post-paid tablet SIM installed. It worked almost immediately after putting in the "vzwinternet" APN. I've experienced a few issues that I was hoping to get some advice with:

1) Occasional disconnects - Connection Monitoring is disabled (this may have helped a little but it still disconnects occasionally). I put my laptop, which was connected via ethernet cable, on a continuous ping to 8.8.8.8 and the connection didn't drop for almost the entire day. It wasn't until I left the house for a few hours that evening that it eventually timed out. My power supply is 2.5a and I currently have the 5Ghz disabled to see if the power consumption affects the connection dropping or not. The 4 antennas I'm using are the 700-2700MHz 4dBi Cellular Hotspot Omni-Directional Antennas. What would cause these disconnects?

2) Not happy with my download and upload speeds - I'm in the city with a couple of Verizon towers within a quarter mile. I live on the 5th floor. I've left the CA on and haven't messed with locking or prioritizing any bands. A couple of times I've briefly seen it aggregate all the way up to 4x. Mostly it sticks to one band (2,5,66). I know my iphone on Verizon is apparently a better piece of hardware but its routinely getting speeds 5x those down/up. that. Just seems like there is more to be fine tuned on the modem/router. How might I increase my speeds?

Down/Up Speeds - ≈20Mbps/Down and ≈7Mbps/Up. (once or twice I've had 60Mbps Down)
Typical Signal:
CSQ:≈23
Signal Strength: ≈74%
RSRQ: ≈ -11 dB
RSRP: ≈ -75 to -99

3) Swapped in my Verizon iphone SIM - Thought maybe the post-paid phone plan might work better than the tablet plan so I pulled it out of my working iphone, put it in the router, and no connectivity. The SIM was recognized by the modem but no signal or cell information was pulled. Tried various APN (vzwinternet, VZWINTERNET, internet, broadband) still nothing. Turned off custom TTL Settings, rebooted, power cycled, didn't help at all. Clearly the SIM works in my phone but can't connect to the network while in the router. Popped the tablet SIM back in and it worked as before. Why wouldn't it recognize my phone SIM?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The phone SIMs are locked to the IMEI of phones.

The tablet SIM is usually the same way. Verizon can be major butts about this. They only want Hotspot plans to be used on Modems like these. So we ahve to hack our way around these rules.

IMEI is an FCC nono changer, but many argue that as long as you own the devices that have the imeis, then its fair game. Until the grey in that matter is cleared we cannot support the sharing of how imei changes are done, but the info is on the web. Especially for Quectel modems.

Make sure you set the IPV4 and IPV6 TTL/HL as Verizon uses both.

Didneywhorl,

Thank you for the response. I'll play around with a few things and see if I can get faster speeds with my verizon iphone SIM. Do you have any experience with the phone SIM being any faster than a tablet SIM or does it not matter?

So far my I haven't had any issue changing the TTL settings through the GUI. The data is coming from my "tablet" and not through the hotspot. I'll change the IPV6 setting though.

Any thoughts on increasing speeds?

Phone plans will have higher priority on network and potentially access to more speed.