Hi,
I am currently testing a Narrowband Cell+WiFi Notecard in France and just found out that one of cards was not able to register to the network anymore. Upon debugging, I’ve found out that it stuck to connect to GSM networks (2G) instead of LTE-M. The card was restarting pretty frequently, which maybe triggered some kind of carrier refusal at some point and made it switch to GSM for this cell tower specifically ?
The troubleshooting page for the module explains that for this range of modules in particular, you can force LTE-M manually when this happens. Indeed, when I tried this out, the module worked and synced instantly, solving the issue.
Is this parameter something that we should do on every Narrowband Notecard we own at startup? It may be a way to prevent the issue from happening again on other devices but I think that would hinder the capacity of the Notecard to find relevant network technologies elsewhere, and especially abroad, when needed and available.
Hi @Anthony75 and welcome to the Blues community!
If a Notecard is unable to connect on LTE-M it will automatically fallback to GSM. If at some point it is unable to connect on GSM, it will “reset” and try LTE-M again. Without seeing the trace logs from the devices it’s impossible to know exactly what happened with your device though. It may not have been a problem with GSM directly, but rather the Notecard was in a penalty box (lack of connectivity) and waiting to retry? The “restarting pretty frequently” statement is a bit concerning too (you may want to look at the _health.qo Notes in Notehub to see if there is any info there for the problematic device).
I should note that once a Notecard falls back from LTE-M to GSM, it won’t automatically retry LTE-M at a later date unless there is a problem w/ GSM.
Lastly, you may want to look at our “midband” Notecards instead of the “narrowband” you are using. You’ll get much better connectivity globally: Notecard Cellular – Blues
Thanks,
Rob