Slow 4G connection only, but only sometimes -- SOLVED

Actually we have a covered screened porch on the Southside I could put the antenna on the side of the house on the South Side while standing on the roof of that porch. I had been thinking of that after discussing it with my wife. But I was wondering if I would be better off with the yagi versus the panel. Since I now know that I'm getting everything from one particular point.

I certainly hear you on the lightning arrestor. I actually have two 12 ft copper ground wires on a 12ft to part on the south side of the house grounding the house wiring. Because I found out that crazy builders had not even grounded the interior grounds. I also use a one shot lightning arrester on my ham antenna.  And PHYSICALLY unscrew the coax cable outside when not using it.  We have a LOT of lightning here in Atlanta.

On Monday just go to waveform.com and have a chat with one of their support engineers. I would guess he would recommend the MIMO panel antenna vs the YAGI due to the trees. The guide they have also covers all that. The YAGIs are best for line of sight with no obstructions as I read it. When I had a chat with them he pretty much went to the YAGI due to the fact that i have line of sight with no trees between me and the tower. The attachment is a clip taken from a picture looking north at the tower. A YAGI here is a clear winner. We tend to have a fair amount of lightning here as well and we are on the top of a ridge.

iTinkeralot - Wow - nice.  Looks like a place I would like to live.

And looks like a place one of my brothers lives in TN.

The other two also live outside of small towns. 

BTW - on lightning - I am a REAL believer in it.

Neighbor on one side - lightning hit tree on the other side of the yard next to the other sides fence and exploded bark all the way across the fence in between and into our yard. from about 15 ftup the tree.

Houses across in the front and diagonal in the front - lightning hit trees and came in on cable line and from there fried just about every piece of electronics in the house - including garage door opener.

Both houses - separate times.

We had a big oak tree in the front hit - and one side of it from a split about 20 feet up - just died totally.

With that and having 4 different houses no more than 2 houses away have trees fall on them from near tornado winds over the years - I had all trees that might split the house cut down in the last 10 years.

A number of other folks have too.

This is a 45-50 year old neighborhood and one of the largest trees I had cut - within 50 foot of house - was an oak over 120 ft tall.  the base where they cut measured 5.5 feet wide - and I counted tree rings putting it back to about 1870 - soon after Sherman came through and burned nearly everything in Atlanta.

We also live in what is called tornado alley - or at least GA's version.  We have had 3 tornados within 1 miles of house in the 37 years we have lived here. The alley stretches from mid AL to to here.

the other reason not to have large trees ….

I tried to post to this thread earlier but it was sent to moderation and never showed.

I’m on B66/n41 no matter where I place the router with B66 getting 3 bars at best and n41 getting two.

I get ~225Mbps at best although there has been some brief instability in my first week with speeds temporarily dropping. My old internet was so awful that it's still 10-20 times faster with TMobile. I ordered the external antenna and will see what that does for me. 

My TMobile/Nokia (cylinder) gateway is sitting high up at the top of a cabinet on the north west of my house. I don't use the wireless that comes with the gateway since I have a better one in use already. I hooked the cylinder up to my LAN via Cat-6. I had to switch everything else to the 192.168.12.x subnet which was annoying but had no problems beyond that.

I tried seeing if I could move the router and get switched to the n41 band but all I got was a really slow B66 connection. There's probably just one tower I can really reach.

In my particular location I have mountains to the East and a valley to the West. I assume that really fake looking tree down the street is the tower 🙂 Local "geographic features" prevented me from using other wireless services. I tried signing up and was told it wouldn't work so was really happy when the 5G router worked. I wish I had known sooner as the older LTE router probably would have been an improvement over my old DSL. I can't get good digital TV signals here for many stations btw.

Line of sight actually goes down towards the tower so it has trees and houses and whatnot in the way so I'm good with 3 bars if that's all I ever get. It's still better than the 10Mbps DSL phone lines I had for the previous 10+ years.

I have posted in many threads and I have done tons of testing.

At this point I have 2 places in my home that the can can go.

Here are some issues I have discovered.

I have 2 4G towers one is .5 miles on the west the other is 2 miles direct line of site no obstruction to the south.

I have only one 5G tower in range 1.5 miles to the north west.

If I locate the can on the west side it gets the 4G tower and the 5G tower ok signal not great but ok. I get speeds day not so great in the 50's many times much less. At night as in 2am good speeds over 100. So seems these towers are overloaded in the day and I would think so there are several hundred homes there.

If I locate the can in the south window it gets great signal from the 4G tower as it is viewable with just the eye. But it gets not so good 5G signal since that is around to the NW. Speeds are like 1-2 as the can wants to use the 5G that is really bad signal.

Now testing with a phone. Phone on 4G on the west window same issue as the can slow 50ish. Same with 5G as these towers I know have many ppl on them.

Take the phone to the south window where it gets that 2 mile away tower that has no homes around it and the phone easily gets 150+ down.

I don't understand why the can does not get the same speed in the south window. Seems the can if it has a 5G signal even if crap it wants to use it even though the 4G signal it has would yield way better speed.

Thoughts?

007BondM16 have you identified the tower connections 100% i.e. you know the PCI the router reports for both the 4G and 5G NR channels? Uso http://www.cellmapper.net/ and confirm the tower(s) that are used as the PCI, physical cell ID can be determined and checked agains what the router reports. In my testing early on with this router I made incorrect assumptions and burned way too much time before I used cellmpapper to have 100% verification. I had a call with T-Mobile support they told me the tower coordinates, of the tower, and I confirmed it all using cellmapper.net to be clear about both the 4G and 5G NR connections. With that information you can know the radios that are present on the towers and see the 4G LTE cell identifications. Since the radios are not commonly omnidirectional it provides more clues as to what cell is sending in the location where you are. It takes a bit of time to pick it apart but is well worth the effort. Use that information and the reporting from the Nokia router to have the facts. One suggestion was made to use Opensignal to locate the tower but it does NOT provide sufficient detail nor does the app differentiate between carrier. It also does not currently support 5G NR signaling. Cómo usar www.cellmapper.net with a local computer takes a little to get used to but is muy informative. When I open the web page it has me in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Africa. If everything is blue zoom out till you can see where you are on the map. Then orient yourself to where you need to be and dial it in. You would find using the T-Mobile USA - 310260 with a 5G tower search to start is less cluttered than using 4G LTE towers as a beginning. There are fewer 5G NR towers reported so it is not as cluttered and you can better see the details of the map. Going from one to the other is a simple and quick selection. In 5-10 minutes you will clearly know what T-Mobile towers are around you and be able to identify the one(s) that you connect to via the PCI reported. The cell phone and router may or may not latch onto the same tower. An iPhone in field test mode will identify the PCI just as the router identifies the PCI for each signal. Start with confirmation of the actual tower the router links to. If you have speeds over 100 Mbs down then your RSRP and RSRQ and SNR values should be decent. 

007BondM16 I forgot to mention that with this router here I discovered with a little rotation of the router I could get the signal of the 5G NR to have 2-3 dBm improvement. I know some users have stated rotating the router made no difference but for me it did help. When I was able to get the 5G NR signal to go up by rotating the router the B2 4G LTE signal would tend to go down pretty much the same amount. I know using the bars on the LED panel on top are meh… but with the n71 5G NR signal improved 2-3 dBm I would get 4 bars vs. 3 bars reported & in test results & RSRP, RSRQ & SNR values plus considering latency & down/up load results my communication was improved. If you are no more than half a mile to two miles from the towers you should get some impressive results. Your post does not seem to note the 5G band but with +150 Mbs down that is not bad. Here n71 extended range LTE is the only option as none of the 5G N/NR towers in the area have n41 radios currently. Even if they are installed it would not help me as I am 5.3 miles from the tower. The 5G NR n41 2.5 GHz band is supposed to have good range and penetration but I don't know that it would be good for +5 miles out. There can be multiple cell configurations so knowing the cell ID would be helpful in the location process. Sorry for the long response. Hope something here helps you get improvement.

Yet another datapoint for those who may be testing.

(BTW, iTinkeralot, I am definitely going to look into the external antenna - but quite busy at the moment, it may be 2-3 months).

I have continued monitoring my unit and doing speed test BECAUSE it switches among cell tower bands.

I have traced them ALL to the same tower I mentioned above - hidden by LOTS of trees but theoretically near line of site 0.7+ miles away.

What I have found is very interesting:

Speed measured with browser on laptop connected via ethernet cable:

Primary  Secondary  Down   Up

b2          n71             112.3    14.6
                                 177.2    20.2
                                 171.0    17.8
                                 126.6    18.7
                                 174.5    23.1
                                 143.0    15.0
                                 147.7    19.6

                                 124.5    19.5
b2          n41             165.9     7.4
                                 265.3     6.5

                                 170.3     4.64
b66        n41             186.5     9.13
 

As you can see the download speed increases, but the upload speed to to poor whenever n41 is in use,

whether b66 is primary or b2.

My guess is the n41 (2.5GHz) is scattered more by the trees and the n71 (600MHz) can make it through even though theoretically it is slower speed - but only, of course, given equal signal strengths.

It could also be that the n41 power of the T-Mobile CAN is insufficient to make it through the trees, for upload, but the cell tower has sufficient power to make it through the trees for reception by the CAN.

So you might keep that in mind - that the n71 will both go farther and through more obstacles than n41.

(And forget n260 or n261 - unless you live next to them with line of sight! - I think they are for mounting on buildings only.)

Another thing to consider - I think the cell towers are never omni-directional.  I.E. they have beam antennas that cover various beams depending on the need.

For example, one near me is pointing AWAY from me and is a VERY narrow beam designed to go straight down an incredibly heavy traffic road.

So even if you have 5 bands on a tower (I have at least that many on the one mentioned), They may or may not be pointing in your direction.

So it could be that n71 is more in my direction than the n41 one.

one thing you learn as an amateur radio operator - radio wave propagation is extremely complicated when you through in all the variables.

itinkeralot, from that photo, has a near perfect line of sight - assuming that antenna has a beam pointing in his direction.

It is clear you are doing your homework. 😉 I would have to only take issue with the "I think" statement. You have put considerable thought into your analysis and your logic seems spot on with regard to the various channels and how they behave. I did a considerable amount of reading investigating the problem and I agree 100% radio wave propagation is extremely complicated. It would be easy to make a simple mistake standing up equipment on a tower. From what I have read the n71 band does have more reach than the n41 but one source did suggest n41 has good penetration. I guess it is all relative to power and lots of other factors. It is not like modulating a signal down a highly controlled path. The n260 or n261 bands are probably only going to be useful in cities and will probably be more expensive to have. I would guess they will be leveraged more for business customers. The n71 signal we receive down here is probably just one of multiple cell paths off that tower as it is just south of the highway and feeds signals along the highway and probably primarily south as the population north of that tower is pretty sparse. The cellmapper information about that string of towers is not "verified" information so it does not provide significant details like the 4G LTE information. The information from cellmapper is only as good as what is loaded into the database. 

iTinkeralot wrote:

007BondM16 have you identified the tower connections 100% i.e. you know the PCI the router reports for both the 4G and 5G NR channels? Uso http://www.cellmapper.net/ and confirm the tower(s) that are used as the PCI, physical cell ID can be determined and checked agains what the router reports. In my testing early on with this router I made incorrect assumptions and burned way too much time before I used cellmpapper to have 100% verification. I had a call with T-Mobile support they told me the tower coordinates, of the tower, and I confirmed it all using cellmapper.net to be clear about both the 4G and 5G NR connections. With that information you can know the radios that are present on the towers and see the 4G LTE cell identifications. Since the radios are not commonly omnidirectional it provides more clues as to what cell is sending in the location where you are. It takes a bit of time to pick it apart but is well worth the effort. Use that information and the reporting from the Nokia router to have the facts. One suggestion was made to use Opensignal to locate the tower but it does NOT provide sufficient detail nor does the app differentiate between carrier. It also does not currently support 5G NR signaling. Cómo usar www.cellmapper.net with a local computer takes a little to get used to but is muy informative. When I open the web page it has me in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Africa. If everything is blue zoom out till you can see where you are on the map. Then orient yourself to where you need to be and dial it in. You would find using the T-Mobile USA - 310260 with a 5G tower search to start is less cluttered than using 4G LTE towers as a beginning. There are fewer 5G NR towers reported so it is not as cluttered and you can better see the details of the map. Going from one to the other is a simple and quick selection. In 5-10 minutes you will clearly know what T-Mobile towers are around you and be able to identify the one(s) that you connect to via the PCI reported. The cell phone and router may or may not latch onto the same tower. An iPhone in field test mode will identify the PCI just as the router identifies the PCI for each signal. Start with confirmation of the actual tower the router links to. If you have speeds over 100 Mbs down then your RSRP and RSRQ and SNR values should be decent. 

Yes rotation even very little can make a big diff.

I have not found an online source of tower data that is really even 75% up to date. At least in my area half of the towers are not even in the correct lat long. The 5G is almost not at all up to date as to which tower has what. I read that many towers and building are lower so they don't have to register the details with the FCC. Anyways I will have some more time to play in a few days had to do some pay the bills work lately.

But past few days I have not moved my can and speeds vary wide from 1 to 150 various times of the day. When I check the can signal always the same so seems to be congestion.

I do love all the in depth details you are going into I think it helps.