4G / LTE signal strength around the seasons

Hi,
Looking at my statistics I can see that RSRP has slowly reduced from -79dB to -84dB over the four months that I've had the service installed. The kit is in my loft space so a bit fiddly to access, so before I do that I thought it worth asking if you'd expect to see any seasonal variation in signal strength. For example is it affected by temperature, day length, or anything?

Thanks, Tony S

If there are deciduous trees between you and the mast it is quite possibly the effect of leaves.

Mine has shifted the other direction in the same period.

https://toop.microsign.co.uk/fud/lte/localdomain/loc...

And it varies every 24 hour period, the SINR is better overnight, presumably because there are just less active devices or other interferance.

https://toop.microsign.co.uk/fud/lte/localdomain/loc...

Thanks. It's only RSRP that's reduced over the period for some reason. SINR and RSRQ have stayed around the same level, varying but not showing any trend of that time. I need to check out the tree question. My first thought is that it wouldn't apply, but since the ground rises to the N of our property maybe the trees there might be high enough to intrude into the line of sight.

The reason for better SINR at night is because the large yellow looking broad spectrum white noise generator that is visible in the sky when there are no clouds is being shielded by the earth.

As for the original poster, lofts are brutal environments for electronics. On a sunny summer day the temperature can easily exceed more than 50°C and the added thermal noise in the electronics is likely to lower the SNIR. I would go for something mounted outside myself.

Over the last week of so the signal strength has climbed back up, currently varying between -80 and -81dB.

Out of curiosity, would you mind telling which service do you use to measure and graph the signal strength, please?

I'm using Munin, running on the Linux box that serves as my home router (Munin uses the vernable MRTG library for the actual graphing).

http://munin-monitoring.org/

I then wrote a quick Munin plugin (just a short bit of bash shell script) to pull in the SXT's stats using SNMP.

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title LTE SXT signal"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel RSRP / SINR"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "rsrp.label RSRP"
echo "rsrp.type GAUGE"
echo "rsrp.draw LINE1"
echo "sinr.label SINR"
echo "sinr.type GAUGE"
echo "sinr.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of LTE SXT signal"
exit 0;;
esac

DOWNLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.4.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`
UPLOAD=`snmpget -v2c -c public 192.168.7.2 .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.16.1.1.7.1|grep -P -o '[0-9]+$'`

echo "rsrp.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "sinr.value $UPLOAD"

I also wrote another plugin for speedtest.net pings:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Ping"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel ping"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "down.label ping"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "down.max 1000"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Ping"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Ping | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"

and the speed itself:

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
config)
echo "graph_category wan"
echo "graph_title Speedtest"
echo "graph_args --base 1000 -l 0"
echo "graph_vlabel DL / UL"
echo "graph_scale no"
echo "down.label DL"
echo "down.type GAUGE"
echo "down.draw LINE1"
echo "up.label UL"
echo "up.type GAUGE"
echo "up.draw LINE1"
echo "graph_info Graph of Internet Connection Speed"
exit 0;;
esac

OUTPUT=`cat /tmp/speedtest.out`
DOWNLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Download | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`
UPLOAD=`echo "$OUTPUT" | grep Upload | sed 's/[a-zA-Z:]* \([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\) [a-zA-Z/]*/\1/'`

echo "down.value $DOWNLOAD"
echo "up.value $UPLOAD"

And I have a crontab entry that runs the speedtest-cli command output to /tmp/speedtest.out every 15 minutes.

You run a speed test every 15 minutes?

I think that is what I left it at, yes.

I was running it every 5 minutes when I first setup my mobile connection, as I was keen to know how well it actually performed over time (as I was sceptical that the initially excellent performance would be consistent).

You'd imagine maybe that it would impact the performance of other stuff we're using the connection for, but in practice the only time I've ever noticed it having at impact is when I happen to be running a manual speed test at the same time. We get zero buffering on multiple 4K streams for example.

But yes, I could dial it back even more, I probably will when I get round to it (at the moment I can't remember exactly where I am triggering the speedtest run from).

Just think what would happen if 10% of people on your mars did the same .... .

There is geeky, and then there is ....?

Yeah, very true.

I've just done some sums and every 15 minutes is 280GB per month downloads. So yes, I really should dial it back (changing it to once and hour would get be consistently under 1TB a month). I hadn't realised it was using quite that much (I assumed it was well under 100GB/month).

I've scaled it back to once an hour.

Happy now ?

LOL
By the way! That "mars", although looking at it was quite appropriate in a way, was entirely unintentional. I've only just seen it.

I typed, or thought I did, "mast". On an iPad virtual keyboard when I was lying in bed. Perhaps I hit the r key not the t key and the spell-checker changed the word.

I was thinking when I posted of the effect on other users. It used to be a big problem on ADSLx particularly Enternet vISPs when ADSL2+ was introduced. BT Wholesale screwed them up so a lot of users were getting low speeds. So those users and some others started running frequent tests, which of course made everything far worse for everyone. The infrastructure simply wasn't up to it. No cost-effective infrastructure could be.

Apologies for that anyway.

I remember the bad old days of high ADSL contentions ratios.

It looks possible that there is zero effect of contention on the mast I'm on. The throughput does drop by about 10mbps during the evening compared to the day. But the SINR also drops by about 8 dB at the same time, which I expect is what is responsible for the drop in throughput.

We are lucky that the antenna segment we are on is sparsely populated. So although the mast does serve ~10,000 possible customers, we aren't competing with airtime with 95% of them.

I'd have dialed back the speed test a long time ago if I'd realised it was adding up to 280GB a month