First outing with the hAP ax lite LTE6. Working well and only eyebrow is that the CA Band is only working sporadically. The field is blank more often than it’s not. Using an 1pmobile (EE) SIM The mobile signal inside isn’t great but I’ve currently got it sat outside on a bench. Without the CA Band, I’m getting about 30-40Mbps which will be fine for running tills & card reader for outside bar.
Is it normal for the CA Band to come and go if the signal is maybe a bit lower. Is CA Band coming from a different mast? My mobile get a slightly faster speed (maybe 10MBps) but the signal at the site is very good - my mobile gets over 100Mbps.
Also am I reading the @20MHz correct - that’s the channel width. Is LTE6 anything like Wi-Fi channel width where wider channel has higher throughput?
Answering own question, the answer is yes. So even if I could get primary band B3 and CA band 20, I’d only increase the bandwidth here by 5Mhz giving a total of 25MHz. Will see what happens on site tomorrow where the mast is line of sight.
PS. I still think Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4GHz is black magic getting 573Mbps over Wi-Fi.
I believe reason for dropping CA is in your signal strength, as you can see, it’s not very good. So router connects to single band where signal is better.
Did you try to move router to better position ?
Also on your phone speed could be better because phone have higher LTE category modem in it.
I can recommend you cell mapper app for identifying cell towers in your area. I use that app a lot. You can see what bands are available on towers in your area, how far they are, they position etc.
If speed is important and cell tower is far away maybe consider using directional antennas like LHGG or ATL. With clear LOS and distance of about 2.6 km with LHGG LTE6 I was getting over 110Mbps DL and 30-40 Mbps UL
With ATL LTE18 and 1.1 km distance to tower I’m getting 250/50 Mbps. Of course this vary a lot when tower is loaded with other users.
I did try outside and got better signal on the single band but didn’t make too much difference to whether CA kicked in. It’s going on-site tomorrow in a location where you can see the mast.
Also on your phone speed could be better because phone have higher LTE category modem in it.
Possibly - it’s a Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Pro 5G.
With ATL LTE18 and 1.1 km distance to tower I’m getting 250/50 Mbps. Of course this vary a lot when tower is loaded with other users.
Mikrotik does seem to be lagging a bit (again?) in terms of mobile/wireless. Still the hAP ax lite LTE6 is fine for this requirement.
ChatGPT really does scare me sometimes. Couldn’t find LTE specification easily in Google search. Asked ChatGPT and instant answer - LTE16 so significantly better than LTE6.
Well I don’t think that im my case. Here I’m limited by the cell tower. Here in rural area you don’t get fancy speeds on 5 or 4G.
ATL18 is much more capable device but it’s limited by mobile provider here. Heck even LHGG LTE6 would be enough here.
That’s why I always check site for cell towers, coverage, which bands are available and application that will be using internet connection and then I decide which device to put.
One site that I mentioned earlier have cell towers about 2.6 km away so no signal on phone either, if you get any its weak 3G which is done for in Croatia, our operators are shutting down 3G. So in this case directional antenna was the only choice.
CA can easily be “lost” due many conditions in the carriers network and tower… So it being “intermittent” is not surprising & and without 5G band your CA “possibilities” with R11e-LTE6 modems are limited. One thing uou can do is add a netwatch that pings using LTE (or better icmp to get stats on latency from LTE), so there is always traffic on the LTE - since not using LTE is one easy to lose CA.
It’s called “3GPP Release #”, with # mapping to various group of categories. So for the category 6 modem in hapaxlite-lte6…it be the “3GPP Release 10” spec. Not sure it helpful… since the “spec” is many many books worth of specs for all the components for 3G/LTE/5G - but if you add “3GPP spec” to the ChatGPT, it might pull more info…
The device was used very successfully at an outside event where there was nearly line of sight to the mast. It managed a very respectable 120Mbps solidly. Didn’t observe the loss of CA band so it might have been a signal strength thing when I was testing at home.
