Forum Discussion
Want Low Band But It Won’t Stay There
I'm close to the edge of one tower's coverage and my connection constantly bounces from mostly very slow speed to sometimes very fast speed. I have tried positioning and moving the gateway to all sorts of places throughout the house to keep it on the very good signal of the N71 low band, but the gateway insists on frequently choosing the N41 mid band that has a barely to no usable signal. It seems to me that the gateway is not at all programmed correctly when it prefers a very unreliable band over a very solid reliable signal on another band. Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe some way to shield the mid band signal?
If you contact T-Mobile support they should be able to preference the signal lock for the n71. Depending upon the gateway you have, i.e. the Arcadyan or the Nokia gateway, seeing the cellular metric information can be hard or easy. With the Nokia it is very easy to get. With the Arcadyan it is a little more effort.
Knowing the location of the cellular signals could help some when locating the gateway but it could still be difficult to get the gateway to hold a lock on the desired source frequency without help from T-Mobile engineering.
Metric info from the Arcadyan gateway- http://192.168.12.1/TMI/v1/gateway?get=all
-OR- you can use the mobile application and obtain some visibility to the cellular signaling.
With the Nokia it is much more simple to just go to the 192.168.12.1 gateway address with a browser.
After recording the cellular metrics i.e. RSRP, RSRQ, SINR values, you can have a better profile of the operation of each cellular signal the gateway receives. This is helpful. Knowing where the tower(s) are and where the various cells originate from can help when trying to get a more stable signal.
Once you have the PCI values for the respective 4G & 5G NR cellular signals using CellMapper.net can usually provide the location of the towers that serve up the respective cells.
Still it may come down to requesting help from T-Mobile engineering if the overlap and signal strength for the two 5G signals are inconsistent. I have seen other conversations where users have had success getting assistance with the problem you have.
