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Forum Discussion
LB1120 on TMobile LTE being throttled?
I have an LB1120 with a TMobile SIM card that I have on an unlimited international data/hotspot plan. Recently I noticed that my speeds had decreaed to around 6Mbps from the typical 20-30Mbps. I lo...
Sounds like that specific tower is heavily loaded or is having a back haul issue. Or you've been deprioritized
OK, possible breakthrough...
It seems that my Netgear is connected to a tower that is serving Band 12 LTE (not LTE+) (cell ID xxxx8534), while my phone is connecting to a different tower that is serving Band 4 LTE+ (cell ID xxxx8531).
I believe the differences in speed are due to the tower that I am connected to with the Netgear. Is there anyway to specify that I connect to the faster, band 4 tower?
Well, LTE vs. LTE+ is not really a distinction based on technical reality. But, it is very true that different bands will exhibit different levels of performance depending on signal, signal to noise, loading, carrier bandwidth, CA capability, MIMO capability, and tower backhaul loading.
That said, i know the mr1100 does not offer band selection, I would doubt if the LB1120 did either. Most consumer cellular devices in the USA do not offer band selection (or the carrier profile disables it -- Samsung) because the US carriers do not want you camping on specific bands. They want to control the band selection process so they can manage their traffic. Similarly, at least on AT&T, my mr1100 always seems to connect to different and slower bands than my iPhone 6S despite being side by side. These days, I'm getting up to 160Mbit on my 6s under IOS12. I've yet to get more than 110Mbit on my mr1100 connected to the same tower.
Similar to another post I recently responded to, the best you can do is to try and bias which band your device connects to by using a combination of directional antennas, selection amplification and filtering, and a lot of trial and error.
If you truly need / want a device which supports band selection you'll need to buy a more commercial (MOFI or Cradlepoint) or foreign (Huawei) device.