@Crellion 

Hello,

I'm also interested in new firmware as this affect my access very much. After half a year we still do not know anything about manual band lock? How much more time we need to wait?

@Crellion 

Hello everyone!

I have some good news!

I've been in contact with technical support and the engineers, and they allowed me to share that they've been working on a beta firmware (for the MR600) which adds the feature to manually select bands. They even shared the beta firmware with me and I was able to test it.

So if you would like to test it out, reach out to support and they might be able to share it with you too.

They also confirmed that bands 1 and 3 are not supported by the hardware.

In my tests (in Switzerland, with bands 1, 3, 7, and 20), I was able to connect to bands 20 and 7, 20 and 3, but not 1 and 7, nor 7 and 3, nor 20 and 1. I was told that the tower actually assigns the bands for the router. The router just tells the tower which bands it supports. So if you choose specific bands (for example 1 and 7), it might be that the tower will still not assign them to your router for one reason or the other, and will instead just assign one of them (for example 1). I also found myself trying several times to switch up the bands to have them connect simultaneously.

I'm curious to see what you guys will find. Please share your experiences if you were able to get the beta firmware :)

Good luck, and all the best!

Would of course happy to test the beta! Applied to the beta test program some month ago but still  havent got any response

@bibou0007 

Try to email them here: support@tp-link.com

It is not an official beta program though. They're just working on the firmware upgrade, and they might happen to share it with some users who ask for it. 

@john.awad Does the same solution apply to mr200? because you directed someone who wants to change mr200 band on a different topic.

@livorno Hey thanks for the heads up. I misread their post title and thought they were talking about the MR600. I deleted my post there. The beta firmware is for the MR600. I can't say if there's anything in the works for the MR200 (but I would guess not).