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Joseps
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Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Dec 31, 2021 10:25 am
Location: Spain

STX LTE drops after 3 hours and 1 minute

Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:19 pm

Hi everyone,

I´ve been using an STX LTE kit for several months in a small village in Spain. It has direct sight of the tower which is maybe 900m away, the levels are quite good and we don´t have any issue with signal levels at all. It worked for several months in RouterOS 6.4x and I upgraded to RouterOS 7.1 some time ago to have wireguard with zero issues.

So all was good and rock-solid, but not long after moving to 7.1, I decided to drop the expensive provider I had that was offering meager 20/1mbps hard-limited speeds (which didn't even reach at all), and moved to a truly unlimited-speed one for almost half the price. The improvement has been amazing, reaching a few times the FasEthernet limit in downloads and having good 30-50mbps in uploads. Regarding latency, the ping is similar (just good enough) but the jitter went down a lot, so a huge improvement overall.
Sadly, also this happened: My LTE connection drops after 3h and 1 minute (+/- a few seconds). Every single time.

I came here and read all the stuff I´ve been able to find, including the superb answers by @SiB. I´ve done my best but I lack the knowledge to diagnose LTE. So far the only I managed by modifying some scripts is to automatically restore the connection sending an " /interface lte at-chat lte1 input="AT+RESET" when it drops, so it usually recovers after 90 seconds (sometimes it takes way longer requiring several resets).
If I don´t reset the interface, it just stays down. The LTE interface status tab, shows no registration or functionallity.

The APN should be correct (in fact, this provider has no authentication and it even worked perfectly with the previous APN). The tests with a smartphone were done with a manual APN setup with identical values.

The roaming is mandatory as per provider default instructions and my own tests (it just doesn´t work at all without it). This provider doesn´t have its own network as far as I know.

I have tried the provider´s helpdesk, and sure they can´t help me as I´m using my own device. I have tested with a phone as a hotspot and it just doesn´t drop. I´ve been laying a ping for 4 straight hours with several 1080p continuous youtube streams running the whole time and not a single packet was lost. With the STX it drops disregarding what traffic goes through. 3h and 1 minute.

Regarding configuration, it has a bare almost default setup. It had wireguard and a script to update duckdns. Disabling both was one of the first things I did. Nowadays it has the lteLogger2 script for ROS7 and the "Simple Internet detection by netwach and log", both by @SiB . I´m attaching a few screenshots of the results of both scripts and LTE status tabs.

I hope someone might have some ideas about what´s going on here. Thanks!


edit: I removed the screenshots. The issue was solved by the Support Team nicely. They identified the problem right away with the info I sent.

These are the steps in their answer I followed. I have done a minor edit as per their instructions, as one of the changes I did in my system is about to be implemented in the next release in dynamic form:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please:
  • for 3in1 type SIM cards (mini/micro/nano), try to use a proper adapter that compensates Nano-SIM card thickness difference or increase thickness by adding a few layers of scotch tape to the back of the SIM card
  • restore LTE modem connection modes back to default. The connection can fail if the cellular provider(s) will need to activate legacy modes for any reason (SMS, incoming call etc)
    /interface lte set [find] network-mode=3g,gsm,lte
  • disable cell-lock:
    /interface lte at-chat [find] input="AT*CELL=0"
    This will cause the LTE interface link to go down, but this is O.K.
  • reset modem firmware settings to defaults with the console command:
     /interface lte at-chat [find] input=AT+RSTSET
    RouterOS will report this command timeout, but this is O.K.
  • Does then subscription from digimobil.es is intended for FWA access devices, eg one subscription traffic shared by multiple users? If not, please try to add the following line to firewall configuration:
    /ip firewall mangle add chain=postrouting out-interface-list=WAN protocol=!icmp action=change-ttl new-ttl=set:64
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Regarding this final point, they kindly pointed out this: using non-FWA SIM cards in routers is not fair to cellular providers which run tough business, so maybe this can be omitted.

I want to clarify that this cellular provider, Digimobil Spain, openly discloses on their website that this is fair use with their data contracts and the one I have in particular. I also checked before signing the contract and later asked their support team about the disconnection issues (they don't support third-party routers, so they just asked me to use their own device). https://blog.digimobil.es/nuevo-ilimito ... mment-9313
 
kaarthiik
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Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Feb 01, 2022 12:12 pm
Location: India

Re: STX LTE drops after 3 hours and 1 minute

Thu Feb 03, 2022 1:20 pm

Hello bro,

I'm facing the same issue like you, can you please help me on that.
I have posted the issue in forum, for your reference viewtopic.php?p=909860&hilit=LTE6+disco ... ue#p909860

More than 10 times of disconnection in a day recently. I'm totally dependent on Mikrotik for internet and calls. It's really frustrating😣.

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