Hi all, got my Invisagig recently and loving it. I’m using it with TMobile with the branded hotspot profile, in 5G SA only mode.
I mostly care about upload speed, which in my area seems to be the best on band 71 (surprisingly). Both my hotspot and the Invisagig really want to connect to band 25 by default as the primary band where I get absolutely horrible speeds. The entire reason I bought an invisagig is so I could disable band 25.
With the backstory out of the way, I’m trying to optimize all the settings for the best speeds. So far, that has been band 71 as primary aggregated with band 41. This gets me ~300mbps in download and ~30mbps in upload. Excellent.
The problem is when the invisagig will switch to band 41 as the primary and drops band 71. Obviously, this is not a signal issue as band 71 has a much stronger signal. But when this happens my speed drops to ~250mbps down and a paltry ~2mbps up.
My goal is to lock the invisagig to band 71 as primary and band 41 as secondary, so that band 41 is never used as primary. Is this possible?
I’ve tried tower binding to the n71 cell, which works, but the band 41 aggregation stays yellow no matter how much data I download and my speeds are ~50mbps down and ~30mbps up. It seems like it’s connecting to band 41, but won’t use it.
Thank you for reaching out and providing such detailed info! Unfortunately this is a known carrier (T-Mobile) limitation at this time as the carrier ultimately controls carrier aggregation combos at the tower. Personally I face this issue at my location as well and actually find that removing n71 and n25 from the enabled SA bands (essentially using only n41 under SA) nets me the fastest download and upload speeds (400/60 typical, 850/150 peak) so I would suggest trying that.
You may also find that 5G NSA could produce consistently better download/upload ratios in your area compared to SA (at least for now) as there are more band combos allowed by the carrier which can be aggregated across LTE and 5G.
Thanks Ryan. You mention the carrier controls the CA combo. That makes sense, but I’m trying to lock to an allowed CA combo.
Just to make sure I was clear:
Band 71 aggregated with B41 is the fastest for me - I’m in this mode 80-90% of the time, Is there no way to “lock” onto this with the invisagig so it stays on this 100% of the time?
When I am in the above CA combo, sometimes Band 71 drops and I’m on Band 41 only - This is what I’m trying to avoid because of the really slow upload speed.
I’m still playing with other band combos, and if I find a faster one I think the above question will still be relevant because I will want to “lock” onto that exact, best, CA combo I find and not let the modem hop around.
I guess I’m looking for a way to at least “lock” the primary CA band while still allowing other bands to be aggregated. I thought tower binding would do this, but I didn’t have any luck.
This is correct. We are always working with our vendor to see if improvements like this can be made to allow this at the baseband level on the client side (InvisaGig modem) but as it stands now there is no reliable way to force the primary carrier channel band and then tell it which secondary band to aggregate with.
The aggregation scenario is always ultimately a carrier controlled situation we can only influence the primary band by limiting what bands we make available to the modem. While we can force the modem to always connect to n71 as the primary by removing n41, if we add n41 back to the enabled bands list the carrier may make this the primary after some amount of time. Tower Locks under SA generally limit connection to the locked cell as you’ve observed.
I have tested with n71 and n41 pretty extensively in my personal usage of the InvisaGig as well and n71 and n41 always tend to ‘fip-flop’ their position as primary/secondary. Any connections with n25 seem to exhibit similar behavior as dictated by the carrier side of the connection so the undesirable behavior is not limited to n71/n41.
It is still very early days for 5G SA with T-Mobile being the only US carrier deploying it mostly nation wide. As we see them continue to tune the available band spectrum in markets we may see this behavior improve.
No problem! Definitely not the answer I would like to give right now for sure, but as we keep testing and have conversations going with our vendor, if there is any appreciable change to this behavior or there becomes known a better way to influence the primary/secondary band preference you can be sure I will be the first to test and share it with every other IG owner.
If you haven’t tried removing both n25 and n71 from enabled SA bands (leaving just n41 enabled) I would still give that a shot as I was surprised just how good my upload got when doing that but I realize I may have more n41 spectrum in my market and this may be atypical for your area. Always worth a try!
My IG on T-Mobile is my primary connection to the Internet so I am super invested in making it work as well as I can not just for IG users at large but selfishly also myself, lol.
