Blog post by Michael
When I travel around the UK and Ireland I take our NB-IoT/Cat-M1 development board with me to investigate which networks are available. Primarily we're checking the roll-out of the 5G bands and their comparative signal strength to the 2G on the same band.
Here in Ireland in Dublin Airport, we first connected to 3 Ireland 2G with a decent RSSI of 18 - not bad considering my phone had marginal signal where I was sitting.
at+cops?
+cops: 0,0,"3Ireland",0
at+csq
+csq: 18,99
I used the AT+COPS command to investigate which networks were available (03/11/2021):
at+cops=?
+cops: (1,"vodafone IE","voda IE","27201",9),(1,"IRL - METEOR","METEOR","27203",0),(1,"vodafone IE","voda IE","27201",0),(2,"3Ireland","3IRL","27202",0),,(0,1,2,3,4),(0,1,2)
at+qeng="neighbourcell"
+QENG: "neighbourcell","GSM",272,01,1F,3B4D,31,57,-92,13,13,0,0
+QENG: "neighbourcell","GSM",272,01,1F,3B4B,7,72,-92,13,13,0,0
We can see both Vodafone NB-IoT and 2G are available along with the other 2 major networks; Meteor (now Eir) and 3 (formerly O2).
We switched to 2G to get a baseline signal strength:
at+cops?
+cops: 0,0,"vodafone IE",0
at+csq
+csq: 20,99
at+qeng="servingcell"
+QENG: "servingcell","CONNECT","GSM",272,01,1F,3B64,36,54,-,-77,255,255,0,28,28,1,-,-,-,-,-,-,-,-,-,"-"
Decent signal on 2G. The nature of NB-IoT means it can use any of the LTE/2G bands and receive a better signal so let's see:
at+cops?
+cops: 0,0,"vodafone IE",9
at+csq
+csq: 31,99