MicroCell Dropped Calls

Question

If by failing you mean the light panel going dark and then coming back that is either related to sporadic power outages, either house wiring from the outlet, a failing ac adapter, or the MicroCell itself is having issues with its power board. Even during an update by AT&T, which happens on occassion and usually late at night, the power will blink out momentarily and then the unit will reset itself if that's required for the update to take.
I wouldn't place the MicroCell in direct sunlight. It does generate some heat and the added extra heat from an external source is not good for it overtime. They should have plenty of ventilation around them. Mine sits about 6" away from a North facing window so it gets light in the summertime but not direct sunlight. In fact, all of my MicroCells have been in the same location.
If by failing you mean losing connection to your phones I sill say it has something to do with your setup. Did you see my post about the pfSense configurations?

Answer 1

The Problem is dropped calls using ATT MicroCell.  Sometimes we look at the MicroCell when we experience a problem and all or some of the lights are off, then slowly coming back to green.  But that is not always the case, sometimes calls drop and the MicroCell shows no changes in the lights.  Without the MicroCell we get a signal range from 0 to 4 bars on our iPhones (4s and 5s) that varies by time of day and location in the house.  Neither phone is more or less impacted and we drop every other call or more when that call is longer than about 5 minutes.  The MicroCell is the older type with the antenna connector (which is not used). History: - Installed MicroCell in 2012, At time time we had UVerse and it was connected directly to the UVerse device.  ATT indicated that our local cell tower was getting overloaded during rush hour (it is located near a major highway) and reducing power in order to shed users.  Since we live some distance away we would just lose our service, it seems we had no other tower to go to.  The situation was elevated to a special case of some sort, a bunch of network analysis was run over a few weeks, and then we were essentially given a MicroCell.  The MicroCell always dropped calls, no matter where it was located, but it was better than no service at all during rush hour and I assumed that it was the bad UVerse service. - In 2014, after experiencing a lot of problems with UVerse reliability, we switched to Comcast, which was 20% cheaper and 5 to 8 times the speed and much lower packet loss.  As part of this change we installed our own Zoom modem 5341J and a pfSense certified firewall (dumped our older SonicWall).  We reconnected the MicroCell and got about the same performance with respect to dropped calls.   Today: - Recently, after reading a bunch of posts here, I relocated the MicroCell from the basement upstairs and near a window in an attempt to reduce the dropped calls.  Has not helped.  We've rotated the MicroCell 90 degrees, and moved it around to no avail.  The MicroCell is currently hardwired wired as MicroCell -> HP Procurve 1810 Switch -> Netgate pfSense Certified Firewall -> Zoom Modem.  WiFi endpoint is currently about 6 feet away (but was more than 20 ft away before the MicroCell was moved). Our house was built for us in 2011 and contains all new CAT 6 wiring which the MicroCell uses.  We have changed the wiring runs, switch ports, etc. to no avail. We have 59.45 Mbps upload, 5.98 Mbps download, 45 ms latency, 7 ms jitter according to www.att.com/speedtest on Sunday morning Aug 9, 2015 at 8:58 CST.  For the speed test the laptop was hardwired to the HP Switch.  This seems consistent with our firewall logs that shows WAN latency of 9 ms to the first hop and no packet loss around the same time.  Prior to Saturday our WAN latency was around 2 ms, but seems to have jumped up over the weekend. I can provide full quality and traffic graphs going back to December 2014. To date we have not been able to correlate dropped calls to local traffic or quality anomalies. We do not show any consistent packet loss to the first hop. In the last 24 hours packet loss had a maximum of 0.4%, average of 0.0%, and minimum of 0.0% and in the last 8 hours 0.0% min, max, average.  Our switch shows zero errors on our LAN. - The Question?  How do I make our cell phone service more reliable?  Having previously designed and managed network services and being an amateur radio operator I have some fundamental understanding of potential problems.  Which probably makes me the worst type of customer to have to support, since it means I am not very accepting of the standard, “Do you have it plugged in?” questions. What I lack is a good understanding of the MicroCell and what in detail is happening when our calls drop, even after reading the on-line MicroCell guide by OttoPylot and FAQs by ATT. I do not have my firewall inbound ports open, I have no problem opening them if I was given a domain where requests should come from, but the docs (ATT Firewall recommendations) just say open’em up baby and thats not going to happen.  The docs don’t give any reason for having NTP port inbound open.  In this day and age, and in this security environment just opening up 5 inbound ports from any source around the globe seems less than professional.  Plus I get a pretty consistent but low number of random blocked requests inbound to the firewall (someone is searching for something). It makes no sense, based on what I know today, that a MicroCell using a secure tunnel would need inbound ports open.  All inbound communications should use the secure tunnel, but I may not know the complete story. The other difference is that the interfaces on the firewall are set to automatic MTU size.  Both sides of the firewall generally show MTU of 1500. I’ve tried 1492 and it did not seem to make a difference so they are set back to automatic. Now if someone has some technical information that explains why any of the above should be changed, then I would be happy to evaluate it.  But the problem does not seem to be configuration, since it works some of the time.  It appears that the problem is reliability.  My firewall and switch are commercial quality, the MicroCell and cable modem are consumer quality. How do I figure out a solution without spending hours on the phone with a customer support person that thinks my IQ is 5?  Now that all of our cell phone contracts are done in September, this reliability problem will feature significantly in our decision to continue with ATT after 25 years.