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Forum Discussion
4G Signal Bars drop from 5 to 2 after 30 minutes and stays that way
Hi Guys, I have a LB2120 and it is working fairly well. I'm in a regional area and have it connected to an external 4G antenna. It's permanently connected to 4G. It is not used in fail over mode. ...
A couple of months down the line and I thought I would record my "findings"
1) For me there is no doubt that the telco switches bands based partly on data provided by the modem. Nothing unusual there.
2) AS I mentioned, my shot at the cell tower passes through seasonal vegetation. Spring (in the northern hemisphere) is not quite finished yet, but I already have arounf a 3dB drop in signal strength and 3-4 in "quality". This has halved both up and down datarate (Although the coronavirus may well have changed traffic patterns). I maybe wrong, but the modem seems to switch between one modulation scheme and another at a quality of 40. For me this is ammoying because I used to be just above 40 and now am just below 40. But the laws of physics are laws.
3) The only upside to this is that the Telco has stopped trying to switch me to the highest frequency band, simply not enough signal.
4) I brought the LB2120 specifically for its B28 capability. It has used it just once ( during a heavy downpour). Data rates are somewhat lower, but a fully acceptable fallback nevertheless. Note that the firmware correctly identifies Channel number, but comes up with radio band unknown.
FWIW
That is very interesting information. As luck would have it I had bought a second one of these modems for the office and they didn't need it so it wound up at my place. I swapped it out with the original. The only thing I'm doing differently now is I have it in router mode instead of bridge mode. In bridge mode my Cisco IPSEC VPN would drop out every few days and I'd have to reboot things a few times until it all got itself sorted out again. Used to take about 15 minutes.
I have done a few speed tests over the last couple of days and speed I'm getting now is way better than I have had in the past.
50.03Mbps Down and 12.43 Mbps Up. This is still with only two bars on on the signal strength metre.
I did go and take a look at the data collection tool you mentioned but I never got to the bottom of making it work for me.
The corona virus got in the way when I suddently had to set up 30 staff to work from home. I think my speed increase may also have somthing to do with the Telco suddenly supplying more band width to the network. It will be interesting to see if it mysteriously slows back down once the health crisis has passed.
After changing modems the lights are doing the same thing. 5 for a while then dropping back down to 2.
In Router mode with my PC behind another Cisco Router I'm also now doing double NAT and I still good speed.
So this has become an interesting anomaly. I thought the signal strength would play a bigger part in the achievable speed.
Maybe I'll do more analysis if I get bored one day.