Lbr20 band lock

There is no bandlock on the LBR20, I have discussed this with both Netgear's technical team - DISSAPOINTING!

I have a full house of Orbi 50's, but living remotely I need 4G for internet, just to be clear this is a broadband sim in the Modem itself NOT via a phone or hotspot.

I have tested so many different 4G Modems, Huawei, MikroTik, DrayTek, Zyxel, ASUS, D-link and finally settled on a TP-link MR600 which is a 4G+ or LTE-A modem that can use Carrier Aggregation (CA).

I have my modem in my loft twinned with a MikroTik mANT LTE50 antenna on 30cm leads.

From the initial standard Huawei on Vodafone 4g getting 25mbs down and 9mbs up, I now have the TP-link getting 145mbs down / 32mbs up.

I acheived this after many hours of antenna placement, testing the CA option utlising 2 bands, ie LTE-A.

I saw that at peak times and overnight Vodafone would switch my 2 bands around contantly at my local towers I sit between. My Router would then stick to those bands regarless of signal strength. I used to get around this by putting in scheduled re-boots or manually re-booting the modem to get them reset, but thats not sensible.

The biggest jump in speed was when TPlink release a beta software that included band lock. have now fixed my bands to 1,7 (UK), and my 85 mbs jumped to 145 constantly, so there is very good reason to do this, if you head to TP-link forums you will see hundreds of users with the same expereince as me, all switching to the beta software and band locking based on their local tower setup.

However, I have to put my Orbi50 Router fixed in AP mode to work with the TPlink, so I was very excited to see a 4G LTE-A modem / router from Netgear allowing me to drop the TPlink and use all the full features of the Orbi system, but I now realise I would have to sacrifice Bandlock to achive this - I might order one from Amazon with the ability to return it just to test out the speed, even though I cant bandlock.

The LBR20 is an LTE-A (4G+) modem and can use CA so multiple bands at the same time, which is excellent and makes a HUGE difference in speed, but without Bandlock Netgear are missing an issue many of us deal with in the real world.

I have a feeling this is more designed as a fail over to keep you going if your hard line fails, rather than a standalone 4G router. Lots of my friends / colleagues in the UK only get 30-70mbs on fibre to the cabinet, and so many are switching overt to 4G+ as the speeds are better and at £20 per month for as much data as you want, its a very good alternative as a primary internet source.

Come on Netgear, have a look at a simple bandlock option, its just a simple software tweek, the capability is already their with CA!