It's frequently changing excellent cell for weak one. I'm not sure why it is happening as there are other cells with great signal. Can it be related to bands?
It's MNO steering users towards bands with higher bandwidth. One better cell belongs to B20 which operates at 800MHz and has thus lower attenuation when passing air snd obstacles. The worse cell belongs to B3 whuch operates at 1800MHz and has thus higher attenuation. Higher attenuation most often correlates with lower signal strength but Tx power and chanbel bandwidth also play some role in it.
Alas, B3 cells have 20MHz bandwidth while B20 only have 10MHz of channel bandwidth. And cell thtoughput is proportional to channel bandwidth, so B3 cell has 2x capacity of B20 cell. At the same time it's likely that B20 cell covers more users (due to lower attenuation and smaller bandwidth), meaning that in average users of B20 cell get less air time than users of B3 cell.
Which, all in all, means that most of time it's better to conect to cell with lower signal level as it likely still provides better service. But the line between "better service" and "no service" can be very thin and the steering parameters have to be fine tuned by MNO (by the looks of it your MNO did it poorly). You can't do anything about it apart from band lock.
Statistics: Posted by mkx — Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:06 pm