Is Vodafone tower working normally?

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coffeebaron

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#1998593 18-Apr-2018 14:16

Rikkitic:

I have been doing tests with a borrowed modem and have now reconnected the original modem. Although I carefully checked the antenna connectors many times, it now seems that there may indeed be an issue with this, but there could also be a deeper fault with the modem. I still can't be 100% certain.

Can anyone explain to me what the practical significance is of differences in the stats? For example, if RSRP goes from -118 dBm to -102 dBm, what does that actually mean in terms of the modem's performance? How much of a signal strength difference does it represent? I don't really understand what RSRP, RSSI, and RSRQ are saying. All I can do is compare the differences and match that to test speeds, but there do not seem to be clear patterns in many cases.

RSRP dropping from -102 to -118 is not good and does tend to indicate antenna cable issue.

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#1998606 18-Apr-2018 14:33

coffeebaron:

RSRP dropping from -102 to -118 is not good and does tend to indicate antenna cable issue.

I'm sure that is true but how do you measure it? How do you know it tends to indicate an antenna issue? How much of a difference are we talking about here? What if it is 3 dBm instead of 16 dBm? What do the figures actually mean? Those are the kinds of questions I am struggling to answer.

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coffeebaron

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#1998673 18-Apr-2018 15:16

RSRP shouldn't fluctuate much more than maybe 2-3 dBm.

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#1998685 18-Apr-2018 15:35

OK, thanks for that. It gives me something to work with. My old modem is working better than it was, but it has fallen back a little. There does seem to be an antenna connection issue with it, maybe also something else. I am going to put the borrowed modem back and see if things improve again. If they do I will just buy it.

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Jase2985

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#1998715 18-Apr-2018 16:07

on my phone 98dBm is 3 bars, 108 is 2 bars, 118 is 1 bar, of signal. does make a big difference in the speed i see. also remember decibel is logarithmic, so a gain of 10dB would represent a ratio of ten to one for power - so 10 dB be 10 times the power, 16dB is almost 100x less signal

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#2000177 21-Apr-2018 10:21

In the spirit of reporting back when an answer is found, I would like to wrap this up and give my conclusions. For the past couple of weeks, my RBI connection has been working very well. Unlike the past, I haven't even experienced any school holiday congestion issues. The connection has been very stable. I don't know what that can be attributed to, but I am certainly not complaining.

My lack of expert knowledge makes it difficult for me to state conclusively what was going on, but I'm certain at least part of it was due to an antenna connectivity issue. Others had suggested this and I did carefully check it many times, but I could never find a problem with it. However, I was able to borrow a new modem and I have spent the past weeks testing it in comparison with my own. In the process of swapping them back and forth, I was finally able to pinpoint this. Even screwed on tight, the connector seems to sometimes make a poor quality connection. This could explain a lot of the effects I was getting. With the borrowed modem it didn't happen at all.

I still have a feeling that there might have also been something else going on as well, but I can't be certain of that. At any rate, the connection now seems to be stable and working well. I hope it stays that way.

I want to thank everyone who tried to help me with this, especially @coffeebaron. It has been a difficult and frustrating situation. It really makes a difference when others are prepared to think along and offer suggestions. I appreciate it a lot. This is one of the best things about Geekzone.

Thanks again everyone.

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#2000180 21-Apr-2018 10:33

Glad its all sorted and what it looked like was accurate!

Maybe i have learnt more about bolte than i thought....

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