So my router shows poor sinr on lte, while it's excellent on 5g. I imagine that's better than poor on both. Is the poor sinr on lte side typical for these
routers, or is it something that I ought to look into improving?
It could be that the 5G bands are on a different tower than the LTE bands. The antennas in the gateway are directional, so your gateway could be aimed more directly at the 5G tower. In my area, T-Mobile’s two main 5G bands (N71 and N41). are even on different towers, so when my gateway is aimed to get the strongest N41 signal, my N71 signal is much weaker.
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Given the way I have heard the T-Mobile strategy for leveraging 4G and 5G for the home internet service I focused my efforts on improving the 5G metrics over the 4G metrics. The heavy lifting of the download traffic is on the 5G and I don’t tend to do much in the way of uploading so I orient my gateway so I get the best metrics for the 5G frequency. I rotated the Nokia GW I have to get better signal wash over the antennas that receive the 5G signal and just the simple adjustment helped improve 5G metrics and improve RSRP, RSRQ, and SINR values. Signal noise and the sources for the noise are often a challenge to deal with.
If you can improve the metrics for both the 4G LTE and 5G NR signals sure that is a good plan. I found placement and orientation of the gateway for focus on the 5G works best for my needs. Over time with different conditions the metrics will change. In some situations, such as 4G vs 5G signal origination you may not be able to influence some of the metrics much. If you can reduce signal noise SNR/SINR sure that is best as noise and poor signal quality will have a negative influence on through put. If the signal is clean with improved RSRQ and SINR metrics the performance will improve as there will be less packet damage and/or retransmissions due to packet loss/damage.
When you make changes and see metrics improve or change run speed testing and record the results. The time of day will be a factor and the server(s) used for the targets for the speed testing. Run tests with different servers and also different speed testing tools. I find using Ookia and fast.com to be helpful. There are a number of speed testing tools. Keep in mind the results with a cell phone vs testing through the home internet gateway can be quite different as the cell phone may not leverage the same source as the home internet gateway. It is more than just using the same cell it is also the hardware and software so just experiment and learn what works best for you there.
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