Anyone have experienced this? Its picking up all LTE bands but no 5G bands. I have a Pepwave Antenna that is rated to receive 5G bands and my iPhone X from AT&T (same carrier) shows 3 bars of 5G. We are almost line of sight to the tower about a mile away.
Here are the bands I’ve discovered for my tower. No 5G at all.
First dBm is RSRP (Strength) and second dBm is RSRQ (quality)
LTE band 14 700mhz -100dBm “good” Strength -10.7 “good” quality
LTE band 66 AMS 1700/2100MHz -115dBm “Fair” Strength -8.6 dBm “Excellent” quality
LTE band 4 AWS 1700/2100MHz -105dBm “Fair” Strength -9.8 dBm “Excellent” quality
LTE band 12 700MHz -94dBm “good” Strength -7.4dBm “Excellent” quality
LTE band 2 1900MHz -123dBm “Poor” Strength -15dBm “poor” quality
LTE band 25 1900MHz -122dBm “poor” Strength -17dBm “poor” quality
I have noticed with my BR1 Pro 5G on Verizon it will not always connect to 5G even when available. Not sure if this is Verizon or the Pepwave doing this, Verizon is NSA with DSS so its still has a 4G core. My guess is it’s something in the modem firmware for the Pepwave, usually if you start doing something heavy like say a speed test it will connect to 5G then after some idle time disconnect. It seems like some sort of power saving behavior left over from the X55 modem being used in phones, I don’t think this kind of power saving is useful on a device like the BR1.
Not sure if there is a way for Peplink to display all available bands not just the ones currently connected, that would help debug. Currently my iPhone shows a 5G connection while my BR1 shows LTE-A, if I run a speed test the BR1 will show 5G and show a 5G 3700 MHz band that wasn’t there until I ran the speed test.
You can see some previous discussion here with screenshots I made when they released the 5g C-band modem firmware, thats the other thing to note you have the latest modem firmware right? Its not obvious how to upgrade it and it doesn’t upgrade with the router firmware.
https://forum.peplink.com/t/c-band-firmware-(verizon-ca)/6369df762a64480bd28b2dbf/19
Doing some research online I found that when AT&T says 5Ge sometimes its not actually 5G but a different band of 4G LTE with faster speeds.
Also, I found out that some 5G bands require the use of a 4G LTE band as an “anchor” to operate. No idea why that is the case as I am not a radio engineer. could also be why it shows LTE only for me. I have not tried a speedtest to see if it switches to 5G.
Verizon uses dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) to share the same band between 4G and 5G. These are 5G “low” bands with the same frequencies as the 4G bands. You really gain very little speed and in fact on Verizon at least there are complaints the 5G version are slower than the 4G currently.
I rarely see my BR1 connect to these 5G low bands, but it does occur once in a while, my iPhone 13 however seems to prefer the 5G bands much more often, or at least its showing the 5G indicator nearly all the time if available.
N77 is Verizons C-band or “mid band” 3700 MHz which gives much better speeds and is only a 5G band, this is the one I usually see connect when doing a speed test and when the indicator on the Pepwave switches to 5G. The Pepwave cannot do MM wave “ultra wide band” like my phone but that is pretty rare anyway only in very dense areas like stadiums or fairgrounds.
Well then I have to assume for now that AT&T 5G is not in this area yet… Thanks for the help.
You mentioned Firmware updates, where would I find those?
Did you check the coverage map AT&T Maps - Wireless Coverage Map for Voice and Data Coverage from AT&T
What does it say? 5G+ on ATT is the mid band and you want your Pepwave using that if possible gives much better speeds. Regular 5G I don’t the details on ATT but could be better than 5Ge (which they don’t list on their coverage map).
Modem firmware is hidden on the support page of the router or is in Incontrol somewhere (which I don’t use). You have to navigate to /cgi-bin/MANGA/support.cgi in your browser after logging normally.
I just found out that the 3rd party AT&T vendor we went with didn’t sell us a SIM with 5G or include us on a 5G plan. That is a special request… This explains the issue.