Is there a way to measure the signal strength available at my location from the providers for the 2 SIM cards I have in my router? The WAN Connection Status always shows 5 bars for whichever card I’m using, which seems unlikely to always be the case and we are definitely seeing different performance in different locations.
The number of bars is a crude approximation to an often useless measure.
To get more details, go to the dashboard, and then click on the IP address for the cellular connection you are interested in.
Here’re a couple of screenshots from a Balance 20x running in synergy mode (hence the four cellular connections):
and
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Thank you for your reply. Looking at your screenshot, am I right in interpreting it to say you have a signal strength (RSSI) of -85dBm? That’s not particularly good, is it? Here’s my screenshot, showing an RSSI of -50dBm, which I think is close to excellent. Am I reading all this correctly?
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Looking at your screenshot, am I right in interpreting it to say you have a signal strength (RSSI) of -85dBm? That’s not particularly good, is it?
For LTE connections RSSI is pretty useless. I look at three things: SINR, RSRQ and which band the connections is on. Then I test for actual throughput.
Seemingly bad numbers may still provide a really good connection on certain bands, and really bad connections on other bands. E.g., in the mountains at one of our locations, band 5 looks really good (but is awful), and band 4 may look really bad but is actually the better choice, based on empirical data.
Cheers,
Z
Which leads to two further questions:
- How do you know which of the bands you’re on?
- How do you test for actual throughput? Empirically as you suggest, by seeing whether you get spinning during a movie?
The bands used are listed on the first line of the panel with the signal quality data (cfr. your screenshot).
[quote]
How do you test for actual throughput? Empirically as you suggest, by seeing whether you get spinning during a movie?[/quote]
Rather crudely - I run speed tests (such as speedtest.net), I run the WAN analysis tool against another peplink unit (I use both a fusionhub and a well-connected Balance unit as servers for that) and also a speedfusion link test (wherever my heart moves me on that day).
There are other, more refined tools for evaluating the quality of a connection, but for the purpose of identifying a good set of bands and (if warranted) antenna deployment I find that these tools suffice.
Watching movies may be a delight, but they are not particularly well suited as measures of good connections. There are too many possible layers of optimization, the nature of which may not be well understood by me.
Cheers,
Z
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I observed that, for Wi-Fi WAN, -75 dBm is 4 bars and -76 dBm is 2 bars. There is no signal strength that can be reported as 3 bars.
I’ve reported this bug via a support ticket, but they have not addressed it yet as of 2.4.0 beta 2.
Not looking to hijack this thread but the comments about signal strength got my attention because I literally just activate a Balance 20X with the eSIM SFC 5G/LTE and based on the signals Im thinking an antenna is going to be required
An antenna (suitably spec’ed) is offering an improvement under most circumstances.
But:
Band 2 (in my limited experience) often reports unimpressive RSRP, but with a decent SINR it still may perform well enough.
Short version: Try the current set-up and see how it works for your use case(s).
Cheers,
Z
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Just to add extra info that you can get from the InControl2 if your device is manage under it. You can have the WAN quality reports which will allow you to check the history signal from time to time. Signal maybe drop or improve in some cases when the cellular module may connected to different bands. Some area certain bands may have bad signal, if you able to identify those bands , you can use custom band selection to disable those.
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