Hi all, 

Came across this thread while searching to confirm whether MR600 can do manual band selection. 

E.g Band 38. 

Also is there a model from TP-Link that does Carrier Aggregation? 

Thank you.

@Sunshine Just tried both those updates, neither works

@Sunshine Thanks for the info on the table. 

My current subscribed ISP is using 5, 38, 40. 

Currently using band 38 as it provides me the best down / up speed. 

Are those bands pairing in the table fixed? 

If CA supports only 2 concurrently, can it support 38 + 40? Or 5 + 38? 

And what does it mean when both bands are the same e.g. band 7 + 7. 

If it supports band 38 + 38, does it mean the unit will get 2x the speed? 

Thank you for your time. 

I set up LTE connections for customers in South West France where they're in difficult situations. I started using the MR600 over similar Huawei products for a number of jobs because it's so feature rich in general. However, manual band selection was a massive oversignt in what is otherwise a very powerful router and in some situations I've used Huaweis instead where I've had to manually choose bands.

I was at a customer's yesterday who had experienced a big drop in performance on the B525 I originally installed on directional antennas aimed at a town about 10km away. I swapped out for an out of the box MR600 with stock up to date firmware and with auto selection it was not delivering anything better (about 30mbps down and 3mbps up). I flashed it with this beta firmware and experimented with the band choice and finally had it aggregating band 28 and band 7 to get a fantastic result (60mbps down and 15mbps up) that just wasn't happening on the auto negotiation. Thank you so much for making this beta firmware public which has finally allowed me to forget about Huawei. You really need to get this feature into your stable releases ASAP. From my point of view, its absence really has let down an otherwise fantastic piece of kit. Just to be clear, that customer would not have bought that router if the facility wasn't there to do that because it would have offered them no benefit. 

As a bit of further insight into the situation there, band 28 was the strongest signal, but giving 8mbps down and 15mbps up. Band 7 was actually weaker than band 3, but giving the fastest download with 40-50mbps down and 3mbps up. I think it's unlikely that any automatic algorithm would have settled on that combination given how weak the band 7 signal was in RSRP terms. 

As a constructive criticism of the beta, putting manual selection of bands in the 'basic internet' tab was a pretty counter-intuitive choice for what I consider to be an advanced feature. ;-) Also, was the design intended that Band A has priority over band B? When I set it as Band A as 28 and band B as 7, then it only actually hooked onto band 28. When I set it as band A as 7 and band B as 28 then it aggregated band 28 and band 7. I was just wondering whether it really does prioritise or whether it was coincidence?

I have just buyed a new MR600 - V1 (still it is not possible to find V2 version).

I have updated with new firmware (1.2.0 0.9.1 v0001.0 Build  200511 Rel.44954n). After this update I could not find the possibility to manually change band aggregation.

So I downgraded to the famous previous firmware (1.1.0 0.9.1 v0001.0 Build 200417 Rel.75138n) and I can find manual change of band aggregation.

This is really a strange situation. Firmware 1.2.0 0.9.1 v0001.0 Build  200511 Rel.44954n is a new stable release after the confidential test release (1.1.0 0.9.1 v0001.0 Build 200417 Rel.75138n). 

But it seems to me a regression to old firmware version with non band choice at all.

@ConanWay 

I'm beginning to wonder, is this 'band locking' feature, a technical related factor or some other factors (slowing / preventing it)? 

I want to support this brand, this model but knowing that I'll be disappointed of it, decided to hold back. sigh. 

Incidentally, encountered a bug in the beta firmware: After I've chosen bands 3 and 28 it connected to them. I switched to 7 and 28, but it stayed connected to bands 3 and 28. I set band a and band b to 7 and it switched to 7. I then switched it to 7 and 28 and it connected to 7 and 28. So it does the job, but clearly has some slight glitches behind the scenes.