LTE Modem stopped working on 1p Mobile

I have a 1p Mobile [EE] SIM card in my Mikrotik LTE modem (an R11e-LTE), and this morning, it stopped working on LTE.

The Mikrotik will register to the network if I tell it to use GSM (and hence only get GPRS speeds), but it will not register if I tell it to use LTE. It just sits there on "Searching".

I tried the SIM card in an iPhone, and LTE internet works fine on that.

Doing a scan on the Mikrotik, it can see all the networks, so why won't it connect to LTE? http://stevecoates.net/stuff/networking/lte-scan2.jpg

Any ideas?

Thanks.
steve30.

In reply to a post by steve30:

Doing a scan on the Mikrotik, it can see all the networks, so why won't it connect to LTE?

Could be a number of reasons:
* APN is incorrect in your Microtik
* 1P have decided not to support data only devices. (Which should be against Ofcom's code). You could test this by using a SIM enabled tablet, or a USB dongle.
* There is a bug in the Microtik software.

Have you checked with 1P ?

If this is RouterOS then 6.45.x is pretty ancient firmware from 2019. Actually I don't see 6.45.9 listed in their downloads at all; 6.45.7 is there though.

Latest 6.x on stable train is 6.49.13.

However, maybe their devices with integrated LTE use different firmware to their regular routers.

Well, that was an odd one, I was back online by this afternoon. No idea what happened, but it seems to be working now.

Just for the record, I did play around with the APN settings (to no avail), as I had had an issue once before with that. I also tried Three and giffgaff SIMs and they worked as expected. The only thing of note is that the 1p SIM seems to be connecting to a mast a bit further away, rather than my closest one.

Maybe EE took a band down for maintenance reasons, your iPhone supported more band so connected ok, the router had a more limited set and couldn't. Ifs possible some band were reserved for VoLTE user's which the router also wouldn't have

Could be.

I was able to access bands 1, 3 and 20 on my MikroTik, but now I can only get band 3.

In reply to a post by mwarby:

Ifs possible some band were reserved for VoLTE user's which the router also wouldn't have

I think if the device is able to tell the mast it is "data only" then this restriction is eased. However EE (and Three) have very little capacity on Band 20, that if the mast can see you are receiving Band 3 it may reject your connection attempt. (The mast is in charge!).

Capacity sites for EE have multiple carriers on Band 3, and multiple carriers of Band 7. Outside of cities it appears Band 1 is rare for LTE (4G) and may be being used for 5G.

Edited by jchamier (Sat 23-Mar-24 10:34:56)