AT command - 3G connection to another cell

i'm using sierra wireless modems (compass 880/888, usb 308) and i'm trying to find an AT command that will tell the modem to connect to another cell (to another tower). the reason i want to do it is because when i'm in a very crowded place, the cellular network is down, so i want to use the next nearest c开发者_StackOverflow社区ell. is that possible?

I doubt there is a command to do this; a handoff between cells is always controlled & initiated by the network.
Despite the fact that this decision is often made based on data that comes from the phone at the protocol level (relative signal strengths of the surrounding 16 cells) you can't force it as far as I'm aware - there would never be any point in doing so:

If a cellular device drops off it's network it will do everyting in its power to rectify the situation - if there is any cell station in range belonging to its home network (or one it can roam on) it will try to attach to it automatically, if not it will keep on looking.

If its dropped due capacity problems the the base station controller (the govenor of a bunch of cell sites) should already have tried to spread the load to any adjacent cells it knows its attached devices are in range of, if thats fails its a good bet that they are saturated too, so switching to them would be of no use.

I doubt that it's possible to connect to a neighboring cell. I'm not an expert, but as far as I know the antennas on the towers are quite directional. This means that the only antennas of the neighboring cell that are pointing at you are the ones on the far side of it. So even if that antenna would be enough to connect (which I doubt) you would most likely have a very bad signal, since the power of those towers is adjusted to end at (or maybe even before) the cell border.

Also, even if there is a command to connect to a specific cell, your device will notice that it connected to the wrong one and try to hand itself off to your current cell.