Information on 10-min mininum LTE reconnect interval mentioned in DeviceOS docs

[Paul_M]

I am pleased with Particle’s progress on the Boron DeviceOS and can report that, at long last, functionality seems highly stable on v3.0.0-rc1. The new pricing scheme does dissuade some of my longer-term prospects, but I still have a use case for Boron especially that I can now investigate low-power applications/solar charging, now that the firmware seems to be stabilized and functional in these areas.

A critical determination in low-power LTE design is knowing truly how frequently you could fully disconnect and reconnect, to inform the tradeoff decision with keeping modem powered.

Question: Where is the official 3GPP specification/documentation/rule/information pertaining to Particle’s vague 10-min reconnection rule specified in the docs? I ask because I have many times reconnected faster than that while prototyping and power cycling Borons, and never seemed to have an issue.

How was the 10 minute figure obtained?

Is this standardized or does it vary by tower?

Thank you. And I call out @rickkas7 and thank him for his work to improve the Boron programming environment and development experience.

[rickkas7]

The 10-minute recommendation is for establishing a PDP session. It’s highly dependent on the carrier that you are connecting to. During testing with a small number of devices, it will almost certainly not be noticed. If you have hundreds of devices it becomes more noticeable. If you have a small number of devices that are very aggressive in reconnecting it may also be noticeable.

In any case, it’s subjective, and the penalty varies from the mobile operator notifying our cellular provider who then notifies Particle, to just immediately banning the SIM from connecting to any tower on that carrier.

For very short wake cycles using a sleep mode where the PDP context is kept active (network standby) is the best way to prevent running into aggressive reconnection issues.