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Cell tower question

sendhelp

Regular Member
Hello guys,

Any reason my router is connecting to a cell tower that's like, no joke, over 10 Km away instead of connecting to 3 different towers that are like 1 to 2 Km away in radius?

I'm forcing B7 as main band, since it's the best speeds on Vodafone but the router is still connected to a cell tower that's so far away, eventhough B7 is also in my range from the closest towers...

Even if I don't force bands, it will still connect to B20 or B1 on that mast that's over 10 Km away rather than masts that are closer.

Any idea?

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If a particular cell is "over subscribed" the mast can signal to the device to handover to another cell. Just like when you are driving down a motorway, each cell hands over to the next cell in the sequence. There seems to be programmable metrics on when hand-over happen, mostly based on physical signal.

I guess you can't cell lock on your device?
 
If a particular cell is "over subscribed" the mast can signal to the device to handover to another cell. Just like when you are driving down a motorway, each cell hands over to the next cell in the sequence. There seems to be programmable metrics on when hand-over happen, mostly based on physical signal.

I guess you can't cell lock on your device?

I see...

It's just that I've got 3 towers around me in a 1 to 2 mile radius and it feels strange that my router is locking on to a mast that's 8 miles away or so albeit with better LOS than the others...

I've got a Huawei CPE Pro 2 so no, can't cell lock. Are there routers that can cell lock?
 
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I've got a Huawei CPE Pro 2 so no, can't cell lock. Are there routers that can cell lock?

Yes, one of the main reasons I tend to go with Mikrotik devices.

My Huawei 5G router did the same, continuously put me on a slower mast which was closer as the crow flies, but rubbish due to interference.

The mast I lock it to is "limited capacity" according to Three Technical Support because the protons are angry and wifi is intermittent, or whatever other excuse the so called expert decides to make up.

But the mast definitely seems to "off load" to neighbouring cells as soon as it can do so. In some cases, it will totally refuse my connection until I get a network refresh/GPRS reset done.
 
I agree on the Mikrotik devices for being able to cell lock.

Just had a similar scenario for a system I installed for someone. A Huawei router with directional antenna would "jump" over local masts and choose one further away but giving appalling throughput. I've just swapped it out for a Mikrotik LHG and can now cell lock it to my preferred cell on a mast and that works so much better. As far as I recall, the LTE6 can only specify one cell to lock to which obviously becomes a problem if that cell is down.
 
I lock to a specific B1 cell for the same reason. I have the Cellmapper app on my phone to keep an eye on that band's PCI number. The PCI changed about a month ago but I spotted the change in the app and I was able to update my router to keep the lock.
 
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