Puzzled by signal strength and performance

[Tommy_Roberson]

An update on my earlier post. I have the 18dbi antenna at home, with good signal at home (-62 rbi, CINR 29). My performance is horrible (.2Mb/s down. 1Mb/s up). CLEAR blames it on "tower congestion"

I take my hub to my office, 4 miles closer to the tower and get similar signal (-65dbi, 28 CINR) and get 5Mb/s down and 1MB/s up.

I thought that distance wouldn't be too much of an issue if the signal was good. Is that true? Would a second antenna make any difference?

Clear continues to say that it's Tower issues, yet I'm pointing to the same tower in both tests.....

[thuor]

One thing to note is that just because a tower is closer to you doesn't mean this is the tower that is servicing your modem. For one the tower antennas may not be deployed to hit your coverage zone but may instead be covering other sectors. Additionally, even if the antennas are oriented to cover your house, other factors may require your modem to connect to another base-station e.g. congestion, channel interference etc.

When tower is congested you will see a degradation in throughput even when the CINR doesn't degrade (it could if you get more interference noise power) because the finite bandwidth is now shared between more users.

One way to tell whether you are connecting using a different tower is to look to see if your base-station ID value changes when you move.