I have two MR6150 hotspots connected to the T-Mobile network, and sometimes they will try to carrier aggregate with LTE bands that appear to be congested in my area. I have seen the two hotspots sitting right next to each other where one decides to connect to LTE B2 and achieves speeds of around 400Mbps, and the other connects to LTE B66 and can barely break 100Mbps. This is from the same location with the same T-Mobile SIM and same plan.

I would love to know what is causing the different behaviors when the two identical hotspots are right next to each other. Sometimes I can get the one that gravitates toward B66 to connect to B2 after a reboot, or driving around with it, but it doesn't reliably stay there. When it is on B2, it performs great, when it is on B66 the performance is horrible.

I did some research and I found out that the 5G Standalone mode used to be offered but was removed, as discussed in this thread: MR6150 - Cannot connect to 5G only bands | NETGEAR Communities

The reasoning for its removal from the firmware seems ridiculous. It reads to me like "oh because we felt like it and you shouldn't use it anyway, Netgear knows better than you and based on a few lab tests we see no real world use case for this setting". Since that response was now around 2 years ago, and in that time I think attitudes toward 5G Standalone are changing, will 5G Standalone ever be added back in to the firmware?

As a test I downgraded my device to a version 10 firmware, and it is able to connect to 5G Standalone, and the performance is far improved from when it was randomly connecting to B66. I went from unreliable and unpredictable speeds to predictable and good speeds.

For now, I think I will continue to run the old firmware so I can have the 5G Standalone feature that was taken away for no reason.

Alternatively, I would love a way to blacklist bands that I don't want the device to connect to. If there were checkboxes for each band and I could simply disable N71, so the device would stay on B2, the performance would be better for me.

As time passes and carrier attitudes shift toward preferring 5G Standalone, is there ever going to come a time when this feature will be reconsidered and put back into the new firmware?

Thanks,

Kirk

Forum Discussion

Will 5G SA support on MR6150 be reassessed in the future?