LHG-LTE6 and other LTE product by Mikrotik should be great, theres nothing else like it/them particularly the dish’ (happy to see a link to some alternative) but being a Mikrotik fan it saddens me to write this largely negative topic. I’m not getting anywhere with it and support are now just blaming towers so I’m writing my experience up here for others to review and save everyone a bit of time.
Ive got a customer installation using LHG-LTE6 mounted on the roof with good site of the tower and good signals (RSSI -47db SINR 22db). Tower has B1,B3 & B20. I also eventually bought a second dish (months later) to setup at the office to make sanity tests and saw the same issues. Ive got several customers wanting LTE connections and this product should be perfect for them but I’m holding off because Its currently not fit for purpose.
I’m on LTE firmware v28 and even had v29 in and have tried all previous versions and the following problems are observed:
Wont get CA on a tower where a phone will, or in earlier LTE firmware (v25) it would get CA and then drop it after a short time
Cell monitor doesn’t show anything or only the currently connected band
Using the band lock I can force connection to other bands on the same tower but no CA. Note above oddity with cell-monitor
Works for a few hours maybe even days and then traffic slows or stops completely even though the LTE interface shows a good constant undropped connection to the tower. (Possibly a pass-through issue?)
Mikrotik support blame the cell provider saying the tower controls CA but I called provider and spent a long time on the phone to verify no issues and CA capable tower + tests with phone
COLLOSSAL frustration and wasted time trying endless combinations of settings from the forum and even other cell towers
SIM card slot is poor design - you need a flat blade screwdriver in order to latch the card in or out - admittedly minor issue once you realise to use screwdriver
Don’t waste your time fiddling endlessly. Remember other LTE devices just work - test the tower with a phone or another LTE device and take screen shots with (cell-mapper, netmonster, etc) to show proof of CA capable tower and speeds, and send to support so they cant blame the tower. You do need to check that the bands available on the tower are suitable pairs for CA with R11e-LTE6 of course.
After all the time Ive spent on this I have a theory that only one radio on the LTE card works properly and the second either isnt working out the box or stops working after a time. Maybe even an internal antenna connection issue. In earlier firmwares where CA worked I would see expected cell-monitor output but after CA was dropped cell-monitor only showed the one band as noted above. I need to dismantle the 2nd dish and make checks on the antenna connections.
I’ll note some good things though - when “working” the upload speed was excellent even without CA. I saw uploads of 20-30M while a phone could only get max 10M upload on the same tower. Similarly when CA was present I saw 90M peak and averages of 70M.
Presently I’m looking for an alternative LTE card to put in the dish, but most “supported” cards seem to have undesirable limitations.
If you have similar experience please note it below. Also looking to hear any situations/experience where the dish works as expected with CA.
I have had nearly all of the above issues you described with my SXT LTE6 (runs the same modem as your device). It’s been awfully unreliable, speeds are horrible and carrier aggregation just stopped working at some point and never came back. I have a different LTE router now which actually works correctly and I’m doing 3-band CA without problems over multiple months at this point with triple the speed I was getting with SXT. I still kept my SXT for secondary connection with unlimited night-time downloads and it’s just not even comparable even though both devices are using the same 140 cm dish to amplify the signal. The SXT shows comparable parameters, but I haven’t seen CA working even once in the last year + the speed is just horrible for what it is.
The last V028 update of the LTE firmware has cut my download speed by 30% (confirmed by other users on a Polish mikrotik group who experienced the same exact issue). I’m honestly just tired of this device already. Spent so much money on it, countless hours going over every possible troubleshooting step there is and I come to the conclusion that the specific issues we’re seeing are just the fault of the hardware itself. I haven’t had any of them with my new setup. Not fit for purpose is the best description of this hardware.
The Chateau 5G is doing full routing, CA is usually seen as B1+B32 or B3+B32 or B1 + N78
The LTAP Mini is in passthrough mode, but as it only has a R11e-LTE no carrier aggregation
The SXTLTE is only capable of routing mode, and only supported B3 or B7.
I have a LTE6 on order, though reading posts by @SiB , they usually replace the R11E with a Quectel EP06 which supports B32
Thanks for the info. Interesting - I have SXT-LTE also and I put R11e-LTE6 in it and had it running in pass-thru mode. But even when it had the R11e-LTE in it I was able to do pass-thru?
I think Chateau has different LTE hardware, certainly does use R11e. Happy to be corrected of course.
Ive seen article on EP06 but it seems to need to work as ppp which I’m not keen on. And I also need pass-thru. Although probably worth trying one for comparative purposes if I could find one cheap enough.
Three is normally B3,B1,B20 around my parts of the UK. I used to see LTE6 successfully get CA on B3+B20 but would drop it after a short time. Occasionally on latest firmware v28/29 it gets CA briefly after a reset then drops it.
Ive got L850 and EP06 on their way to test with. Im slowly reaching conclusion that LTE6 is just a bad card. The Dish itself is a great product.