After rebooting my max transit duo, I nearly always find that my speedtest.net results are much betters. Sometimes the results are 10x faster. I use AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile SIMS and see the same behavior across all SIMS.
I checked the real time activity and I don’t see any active clients sucking up all of the bandwidth before doing a reboot. I also check the bands prior to reboot and I’m often on the same bands after a reboot when speeds improve.
Any idea why this would be happening? Should I be doing a reboot every so often? If so, is there any way to automate this?
Sometimes i have to reset the cellular on my device to make it work properly, the only way i found is to schedule a reboot every morning at 2 am. so i’m sure that each day start with a fresh signal strength
“often on the same bands” I would look more closely at the details… Take note of your bands and which cell tower you might be connected to before and after reboot. For me, I am equidistant between two cell towers. My connection hops between the two. I could be on the same band but after reboot or moving the cellular to disabled then back to enabled, my device connects to a different tower, which yields different speeds.
Today I kept track of the pre and post reboot details. As usual speeds were faster after reboot. As @mystery suggested, I am on a different tower after reboot.
Left is prior to reboot and right is after reboot.
The “Active” value is for “Dormancy Status”. I have not idea what this value means.
The weird thing is that I’m currently in the middle of a rural area, and I have yagi directional antennas pointing at the cell tower that I measured to have the strongest signal. It is hard to understand how the tower would change, but it did in fact change.
Wiser people than I might actually know this, but based on my observations I expect that what you are seeing is simply your router latching on to different bands at the same tower. The cell ID identifies the tower, but a single tower may (and often will) serve more than one cell (and thus present multiple cell IDs).
In your case the tower serves both B12 and B2, with B2 being the better connection when primary (at least in this example). The reported cell ID is presumably that of your primary connection, hence the change from the first to the second example as the primary band changes.
Just for fun: You might try to turn off B12, and see how that works for you. (You may drop from LTE-A to LTE, but it might still be the better connection overall.)
Thank you for the feedback. That does make sense. It is not totally clear why the router only switches to the higher signal quality cell after a reboot however.
Separate topic - To select a band I start with all bands available. Then, I do a speed test. Then, I remove one of the bands being used. Do another speed test. I do this until my speed test show slower results, then I revert. In this case removing B12 resulted in slower speeds. I don’t recall exactly, but I believe B66 has been unchecked in this scenario.
Hi Paul. I’ll just mention that our experience is much the same as yours. We have several customers who use mostly AT&T SIMs in various BR1 LTEA models. Once started up if they are in LTEA mode they won’t be for long. - Rick
The band selection is performed by the carrier. The router is involved only to the extent that it serves up a menu of bands that it is capable of employing. The carrier then proceeds with whatever criteria/algorithm it finds suitable for the circumstances.
- Rick