Re: Nighthawk m1 4g+ only

Srennie837 · ‎2018-01-24

Hi,

My Nighthawk M1 (EE UK, not US) is currently connecting to a mast with 5 bars of signal on 4g, and gets 10mb/s speeds. There is an other local mast with 3 bars of signal on 4g+, and can get up to 130mb/s speeds.

Is there any way to force the nighthawk onto the faster mast? Or use the carrier aggregation to connect to both?

Thanks in advance.

TeeJay74 · ‎2018-01-24

You could try with directional antenna. Inter-site CA is not yet possible.

Srennie837 · ‎2018-01-25

Is there anyway to select which band to prefer then? Currently I'm on band 3 but band 7 is faster on the other mast. I'm on setting 02 which is LTE only, but I know in previous Air Cards you can adjust through the AT settings to add more choices.

TeeJay74 · ‎2018-01-26

Band locking can be useful in some situations and Netgear knows this. I see UE band locking features as a tool for handling special situations. MR1100 webgui does not have this kind of feature at the moment. Let's hope that developers add this feature to future firmware release. Automatic band selection does not always bring best actual performance and that is a real problem. Anyone who has done a lot of fieldtesting knows about this.

Srennie837 · ‎2018-01-26

Yeah I wish you were able to do it in the gui. I know you can do it once you have got past the "AT!ENTERCND" menu through telnet port 5510, but without the correct password that is as far as I can get unfortunately.

Srennie837 · ‎2018-02-01

II've managed to get this info out of the modem.

AT!GSTATUS?

!GSTATUS:

Current Time: 16966 Mode: ONLINE

System mode: LTE PS state: Attached

EMM state: Registered Normal Service

RRC state: RRC Connected

IMS reg state: No Srv

PCC:

LTE band: B3

LTE bw: 20 MHz

LTE Rx chan: 1667

RSSI (dBm): -33.0

RSRP (dBm): -59.3

RSRQ (dB): -7.7

RSSNR (dB): 30

Tx Power (dBm): -21.0

LTE Cell ID: 5089538

Physical Cell ID: 349

TAC: 11694

AT!GSTATUS?

!GSTATUS:

Current Time: 17273 Mode: ONLINE

System mode: LTE PS state: Attached

EMM state: Registered Normal Service

RRC state: RRC Connected

IMS reg state: No Srv

PCC:

LTE band: B3

LTE bw: 20 MHz

LTE Rx chan: 1667

RSSI (dBm): -72.8

RSRP (dBm): -104.3

RSRQ (dB): -8.6

RSSNR (dB): 10

Tx Power (dBm): 22.0

LTE Cell ID: 4470786

Physical Cell ID: 416

TAC: 25086

SCC1:

LTE band: B20

LTE bw: 5 MHz

LTE Rx chan: 6225

RSSI (dBm): -65.8

RSRP (dBm): -88.0

RSRQ (dB): -8.3

Physical Cell ID: 366

I obviously want to connect to the second of the two as it is using 2CA, netgears customer service is appaling though.

The issues I had had trying to get some resemblence of help are;

The chat service - advised to use this on the support page, and they don't support mobile dongles, what they call "air cards"

The telephone "technical" service - reading from a script, and won't help as "they don't have the training" literally what I was told. would'nt pass me onto someone that could. Told me to contact community support.

The e-mail service - Don't read the tickets, told me to contact the ISP if I needed a return/replacement.

Literally the response "As per the serial number of your device, we were able to identify that your unit is not a retail product. This type of unit is engineered / customized based on the needs of an Internet Service Provider and can only be obtained through them. This means that the support including the replacement / return should be handled through the Internet Service Provider which the product was obtained"

EE don't manufacture the devices so why should they support it in this manner?

The company is impossible.

TeeJay74 · ‎2018-02-01

Hi,

I think your EE MR1100 is not faulty. That single cell B3 signal strength is so much stronger (RSSI -33) than other B3 so highly likely that is going to be selected as PCC. On the other hand, sim card should have a list of preferred band combinations, with CA or without. That affects band selection too. Signal values are everchanging and device should select "best" service. In real world that selection is not always providing best performance. Some issues belong to the nature of 4G LTE technology which has some weaknesses. In your case I would try to use directional mimo antenna's to get stronger signal from that B3+B20 direction. This should work if both towers are not in same direction.

Srennie837 · ‎2018-02-01

Thanks for your advice, I was really hoping there was a way to do it with software so I wouldn't have to buy a mimo yagi array, I'm too lazy to build one.

Oh well, I never thought there was an issue with my device, I'm so close to the bad mast that I'm worried that even with a highly directional antenna it might still pick up the unwanted mast.
I'll build the antenna over the weekend and give it a go.

UK-based · ‎2018-02-02

Srennie837, I'm also an EE customer and have had a similar experience to you - I managed to get through to the technical support team and it was clear they knew very little about the M1. They told me to contact Netgear as explained in this post. Surprisingly, it seems they don't know when the M1 will auto-update and they are not informed of the changes in new firmware releases, even though it seems that firmware is customised for specific countries/carriers (hence our model being referred to as MR1100EE). I find this amazingly incompetent - carriers supplying modem/routers as part of a mobile internet package should insist that they are made fully aware of the status of the equipment (firmware, software, etc.) by Netgear so that they can properly support their customers.

By the way, how did you access the basic AT command data - did you have to connect to the M1 directly via tethering with the USB-C port? I've tried via Ethernet without success.

Also, how did you get the second status data for the weaker mast - was this trial and error positioning of the M1 or did you have to move closer to the mast?

Srennie837 · ‎2018-02-02

Hi Luminary,
I'm glad I'm not the only person pulling my hair out.
To get into the CLI I used putty over the usb tethering on port 5510, it blocks it otherwise. To get the better mast I didn't do anything, the mast that's closer cuts out sometimes for a few minutes at a time and I happened to be in looking at settings when it did. It's annoying knowing that high speed 4g+ is so close but I can't use it.

At this rate I'm just going to solder a pair of yagi arrays together and be done with it.

TeeJay74 · ‎2018-02-02

Sometimes "more is less". Having 2CA active sometimes can give lower performance compared to single cell from different tower. Let me explain what I mean.Sometime ago I had a experience with MR1100, I was close to single cell(distance several hundreds of meters) with SINR 30, full 256-QAM effect and DL throughput 200 Mbps+ with Huawei Mate 10 Pro cell phone. In this same place MR1100 preferred practically always 2CA from far away towers with bad signal values. It was pure struggle, "more is less"- situation. I wish MR1100 would have webgui single band lock feature for handling special situations like this. I reported this experience to Netgear system engineer. Hopefully he reports it to developers.

Srennie837 · ‎2018-02-02

Just having more options on a supposedly high-end dongle would be nice.

The issue with the mast closest to me is due to the remote location its back bearer is a sat link. The latency is terrible but the connection also drops out all the time. I'd live with it even if it was slower.

Netgear just seem very unhelpful.

nhantenna · ‎2018-04-07

@JasonNThe theme of band selection and performance is appearing across posts. The automatic switching back and forth between "good" and "bad" bands is confusing. It is the wrong way to communicate this information to end users who are misinterpreting it. At the end of the day, these users are trying to dial in their Nighthawk performance. These performance metrics are what Netgear needs to show instead. Further, while allowing Nighthawk owners to permanently select their cellular band likely not work for Netgear or carriers (like AT&T) it may make sense to give Nighthawk owners temporary control over cellular band that times out after 30 minutes. For example, if a Nighthawk owner is debugging performance/antenna/etc they could temporarily force band 4. Band 4 would remain for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes expires, then Nighthawk resumes normal band autoselection.

Tweakster · ‎2018-08-16

@Srennie837

I sussed how to do the band steering, did you still need it?

Srennie837 · ‎2018-08-16

Yes please. How did you do it?

JSchnee21 · ‎2018-08-22

+1

Joyfuldad · ‎2018-10-09

How did you accomplish the band steering ?

TCsBack · ‎2019-04-07

How did you work out band steering?

Tweakster · ‎2019-04-07

From what I can figure out the AT command adds to the band region drop down menu.

So AT!BAND=03,"LTE B20 ONLY",0000000000000000,0000000000080000

Adds the word lte b20 at drop down position 3

I then made a string for the the other bands

AT!BAND=04,"LTE B20 ONLY",0000000000000000,0000000000000004

I had to use a proper code editor as my text editor adding control character.

Let me know how you get on.

1) Connect M1 via USB and switch off WiFi in your PC so that there is no IP conflicts

2) Using PUTTY or any Telnet utility, Telnet 192.168.1.1 Port: 5510

3) Issue the following AT commands(you can copy and paste them, one at a time)

AT!BAND=03,"LTE B20 ONLY",0000000000000000,0000000000080000

AT!RESET

Once the device resumes, go to GUI/App -> Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Cellular -> in the Band Region drop down you will now have one additional option called "LTE B20 ONLY"

Select that option to force to B20 only.

englishl1989 · ‎2019-07-09

Does this persist after a reboot of the device or do you have to re-issue the AT commands each time?

Tweakster · ‎2019-07-09

Yes this will survive a reboot but not a factory reset.

englishl1989 · ‎2019-07-09

How did you work out what AT commands to enter (in case I wanted to add any other bands in the future?)

Considering buying one of these - would you recommend it for performance? What sort of speeds are you getting with it locked to a band?

Tweakster · ‎2019-07-09

I get up to 200mb and would definitely recommend it as I needed a CAT5 port and external anteena ports.

The commands were a lot of digging, you have to query the modem using AT commands to see which bands the variant supports (different worldwide models) then you use this info to create the additonal entries.

Also not all networks support all bands and some networks don't give access to some bands if you are on a PAYG so don't expect every band to work.

MrBooMY · ‎2019-07-11

https://mt-tech.fi/en/enable-manual-band-selection-on-netgear-mr1100/
That's where he got it from and it works. Also if the value is all zeros you can do a single 0. Also if the value is 0080000, you can do 0,80000 without the other zeros.