@nsmith1979 not having a cell locking feature is causing me a problem. The ER701 keeps camping on a cell tower that has bad congestion, the only way I can get it to use a better tower is by setting the 4G band selection to 'manual' and selecting the required band.

 

This causes another problem, because I'm having to manually select the band (band 3 in this case) I don't get any carrier aggregation (band 1 & band 32 are available on the tower) so performance is affected.

 

Can this feature be added to the user interface or made available via the terminal, using AT Commands? I believe it should be available on the Fibocom FG370-EAU modem as a standard AT Command.

  @nsmith1979 

 

Agreed..... this has my vote.

Valuable addition

  @nsmith1979 Because a "cell locking" solution may not ever come about from TP-LINK, this provides some insights within your own control that you can do today.  Some might not be practical for you, but theoretically the idea is to provide your phone modem radio conditions that yield your desired connection speed and stability.  

 

You modem makes signal strength and quality decisions where to park itself.  There are also bits in the cell site stream letting your user equipment (UE) know if 5G is available and other optimization instructions.   You will learn a lot.  Get an Android phone (iPhone does not allow this level of detail).  Samsung is great.  Download Network Cell Info Lite app (there are others... Cell Monitor, nPerf) which will show you signal and quality, cell site info, band and many other technical parameters.  Walk around your premises while watching your indicators.  Find the best location.  Be aware that you may need to leave your phone be to settle in and switch to best server.  Or put into airplane mode and back out to reset and respawn a connection.  Test speed in your best locations and see how that works.  Realize that being in a window facing a direction puts bricks and mortar attenuating other directions.  You want to become aware of how you are increasing the signal strength and quality of your desired cell site (server), while decreasing undesired signals/directions.  

 

On a Samsung phone, you can turn OFF specific bands (*#2263#).  This is better than specifying a certain band only.  Rather this works the opposite way, but deleting an undesired or problem band, while leaving all others just fine.   I often turn off all 5G services, because 4G LTE with CA is faster!  BUT... to get the aggregate speed, you have to see the middle bands (1800 to 2600 MHz) very well.  

 

Bottom line... if you can optimize the link to your phone first... find that magic location... then you look for ways to achieve this on your modem connection.  Moving the modem/router to a location that favours your best server is one way.  Directional antennas work too, but fail MIMO that is used for parallel streams delivering increased speeds.  

 

Good luck!  

  @RF_Dude thanks for the response.

 

The issue isn't with placement of the ER701 gateway, I've placed it in the best location possible to try and pick-up the cell tower I want to use.

 

The issue is there are 2x 3UK cell towers that cover the same general area, the distance between the two from my location is about the same (1.5km). One of the cell towers is using Ericsson AAU's & the other is using Huawei AAU's for 5G n78 coverage. The Ericsson cell tower suffers badly from congestion whilst the Huawei cell tower is much better.

 

The ER701 is orientated towards the Huawei cell tower, it's pointing away from the Ericsson tower, but the ER701 will always camp on the Ericsson tower (even though the Huawei tower provides a stronger signal). This results in a pretty much unusable service.

 

The only way I can get the ER701 to camp on the Huawei tower is by manually selecting LTE band 3, which then provides 5G NSA. This provides upto 900Mbps during off peak times and 400-500Mbps during peak times, but because I'm having to manually select band 3, the ER701 doesn't connect to band 1 & band 32 for LTE carrier aggregation. This means I'm losing 35Mhz of available bandwidth.

 

If TP-Link could provide a cell locking feature I'd be able to lock the PCI & EARFCN of band 3 broadcasting from the Huawei tower and also get carrier aggregation on the other bands.

 

If band 32 was made available to be selected in the manual band selection (with a warning that it's an SDL only band, or not be selectable on its own) that would help.

 

I'm pretty sure the Fibocom modem will support these functions 'out of the box' so it should just be a firmware update to make them available, or even provide shell access to the modems AT Commands, only making the cell locking feature available.

Without this feature the TP-Link APs are not very useful on networks without a controller. Hard to believe that such simple thing is overlooked. Gees someone bought a TP link AP and not interested in OMADA...