Three and connection/disconnection cycles

Hi,

Have Three 4G broadband setup here at home. Actually quite a sophisticated setup with an external antenna and load-balanced with another 4G (EE) connection. Most of the time, it all works very well.

Anyway, what I have noticed with increasing regularity on the Three connection, is a "spat" of multiple connection/disconnection cycles every 24 hours or so. The connection will drop, reconnect, drop, then reconnect - sometimes as many as 10 times in quick succession before settling down again. This happens anytime of the day or night and regardless of current data throughput.

RSRP is a solid -82 db and does not fluctuate much. I have locked the Mikrotek modem to band 3 for maximum bandwidth, as it would have a habit of switching over to band 20 with the resulting drop in speeds and it would not automatically switch back to band 3. I get around 80Mbps on a good day.

Anyone else experienced this? Any tips etc? I am thinking that maybe the RSRP needs to be higher to ensure a rock-solid band 3 connection and that perhaps brief bursts of interference is causing the connection to drop? I cannot see it being a capacity issue as a/. The connection always comes back onto band 3 and b/. these dropouts often happen late at night when predicted usage would be much lower (given that I am in a rural location also).

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Dan

I get a solid -84 dB on my Mikrotik to Three and top out at 80mbps, I don't see many disconnections at all (and when it does it tends to be down and back up, without any flapping). My Mikrotik can only see a band 3 mast from where it is pointed, so I don't have problems with it dropping down to 20.

I do however see roughly daily freezes in data, which I address with a script on the Mikrotik that cycles the connection if it can't ping Google.

Would be interested in having a look at your code if possible

Thanks!

Dan

It is pretty simple:

Text
1 23 45 6	:if ([/ping address=8.8.8.8 count=1 interface=lte1] = 0) do={  :log info "NOT Pinged" [/interface disable lte1][/interface enable lte1] }

I should probably tweak it to ping a few more times and only restart of no packets are returned.

I then use the Scheduler feature to run it once a minute.

I probably could have used the Netwatch functionality to achieve it too:

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Tools/Netwatch

It has just occured to me that these scripts are running on a device that can send "unlimited" SMS messages. I could create a poor man's pingdom.com and save myself a few quid a month