Question

Anyone fed-up with horrible coverage from TMobile


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This is a Description of our Complaint with T-Mobile and the BBB:
For the past almost 3 years we have had all of our family cell phone lines with T-Mobile. We switched over from Verizon about 3 years ago because we responded to a promotion offered by T-Mobile whereby offered much better coverage at much better prices. Turns out that their marketing in advertising campaign was misleading and inaccurate at best. From day one, the coverage and reception was below any basic level of acceptance causing phone calls in messages to drop or fail at a rate off three failed for one success. After a few months, I complained with T-Mobile, they profusely apologized and told us to be patient because they were in the process of rolling out their new 5G Network and also merging their Network with sprints, and they said that the coverage and service issues will greatly improve in a matter of weeks or a couple of months at the most. When this didn't happen, I called to request a transfer of service and they insisted that it was just a matter of time for their coverage and service to noticeably improve and they offer a nominal remporary discount to keep us from switching over. As expected, the coverage and service not only did not improve but got worse. After another 12 months have gone by and everyone in our household having being fed up with dropped calls failed messages in lack of connectivity, we have decided to switch over to another carrier. When I call T-Mobile to inquire about the process, they told me that we're free to switch over but they're going to charge us retractively rebates and fees that they have waived because we're not meeting the term of our contract. And my question to them what kind of compensation do we get for the 3 years of failing to provide the most basic service that we have been faithfully paying in full for almost 3 years. We'll know that these are tactics that these types of companies use to hold people hostage regardless of whether they are the ones at fault in causing you to leave. This should be unacceptable!


90 replies

Userlevel 2

What's ironic is the in Tmobile's terms and conditions, that no one reads before signing , TMobile doesn't guarantee service.

No way…. I always read through usually now I feel a little screwed! My calls and reception are terrible. I work on the road and I can’t keep good reception for the world. I can’t even keep a phone call with my mom in the grocery store or in my own house anymore. I’m over it. I want out of this. And the OP is right!! How do they plan to compensate for all the missed phone calls and dropped calls and missed data due to their terrible advertisement! Shame on T-Mobile! 

i wish I could tag them in this….  

Userlevel 7
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Won’t do much good but assist in having you ported.  I’ve filed tickets for several of T-Mobile’s ‘Dead zones’ that T-Mobile has claimed ‘Verified 4G LTE’, as well a 5G service.  These areas get you … ‘No Service’ or ‘Emergency SoS’ only on AT&T or Verizon.  It’s been 7 years, and  their maps show ‘more’ coverage, yet … the service is still the same.

  1. Try before you buy.  Wireless is notorious for this.  Not everywhere is equal with all carriers.
  2. Don’t buy the line of “we’re deploying 5G and it will get better” - as it may .. but not always in all places.
  3. Their merge with Sprint shouldn’t cause YOU issues .. that’s for Sprint customers, mainly.
  4. Their ‘apologies’ won’t fix the service.

If T-Mobile ‘billing/care’ reps won’t fix, escalate through BBB.  T-Mobile upper levels will contact you, as they dislike the public rating that they’re getting, and want to resolve the issue (i.e. will work for ratings).

 

BBB customer reviews:  1.2/5stars

Userlevel 7
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What's ironic is the in Tmobile's terms and conditions, that no one reads before signing , TMobile doesn't guarantee service.

Userlevel 7
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T-Mobile reps will state this as well.  Sadly, the advertising and ‘Awards’ department end up on the promotion as ‘most reliable 5G network’ which sells, but sadly doesn’t mean much when service doesn’t work.

Userlevel 1

I used to have good coverage at home. Submitted ticket. They upgraded my data to unlimited for the same price.  No improvement. Got new 5G iPhone. No improvement. Rarely used to deal with no signal or dropped calls. Now it’s constant. 
 

I like the customer service and good price, but those things don’t matter. I need to depend on coverage. So, I’m ready to switch to more expensive Verizon. If I get a more reliable signal, I’ll stick with Verizon.

Fortunately, I am on prepaid with no contract on a phone, so the switch will be easy.

It’s too bad, because I would have stayed loyal to T-Mobile, but I have tried working with them through these changes and things keep getting worse.

Userlevel 1

I am tired of taking calls in the great outdoors where I can almost see the cell tower from my house.  Can’t get reliable service in my office and calls often drop in my house.  Does the “5G” stand for “Get 5 Gigs away from your house?”  Go to the T-Mobile Store you say?  Got two hours?  We laugh at the commercials in this house!  “Can you hear me now?”

Userlevel 1

All mobile networks have dead zones, and I understand that, HOWEVER, it is outright fraudulent to publish maps claiming coverage exists where it does not.    If anyone ever starts a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile/Sprint, I would sign up the first day because I am tired of paying for empty promises.

Userlevel 1

Appears T-Mobile marketing has oversold services (too many phones for network to handle).  Good service when it works, but not near my house anymore. I live the twin cities MN suburb, T-mobile coverage map shows complete coverage at my home, which is not true. 

Userlevel 1

I have had service say 5g and can't call out it will say call failed. It drops calls constantly  I can't send or receive texts or I have to download the texts.  I just restarted my phone and got 52 texts I missed from the last 2days.  This all started after the merge with sprint  it is a terrible company now

Userlevel 1

I was a previously happy Sprint customer with no problems. I was not only forced to move over to T-mobile but I also had to put out $1300 for an iPhone 13 Pro just to be compatible with their 5G network. At first it wasn’t too bad, sometimes a little slower. But within the last week or two, I am down to 1 bar, a warning will pop up that I am not connected to the internet (my home internet is switched off on my phone), it takes forever to load an internet page if it loads at all and messages take a long time to load. What is going on? This is so frustrating!

BYW I live in the North East USA.

Userlevel 7
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Sadly, especially in many parts of rural America, T-Mobile’s advertising of coverage is often far from reality.  Coverage might mean climb up a 100’ tree and you can get service.d

Userlevel 1

Sadly a once great cell coverage is now crap.  And Website is so slow it is hardly usable. Barely works at my home.  20 years ago everything was great.  Then 5+ years ago problems, dropped calls, usable voice quality, missed calls & messages, sometimes can not call out at all.  T-mobile sent repeater boxes, nice fixed problems for a while.  Now repeater box only has 0-1 of 5 bars, most of the time (was 3-4 bars).. Appears that rollout of 5G, is killing 4G LTE coverage, and/or 5G cell upgrades have caused problems.  No solutions from T-mobile in 18 months of complaints.  Same thing happened with Verizon 20 years ago, they over sold service (too many phones for # of cells), and coverage got poor.  Switched to T-Mobile, a small company that cared.  Now T-Mobile is the 900lb monster, that does not care.  All T-Mobile effort into marketing, not customer service.   Appears T-Mobile marketing has oversold services (too many phones for network to handle).

Userlevel 1

t-mobile SHOULD be called t-don’t move or your call will be dropped OR YOUR TEXT failed to go through!!! 5g stands for 5GIGS of ram for the whole country!!!!!

they LET ANY hackers in for your information OR ANYONE LISTEN / TAP your phone!!!!

 

DO NOT GET T-MOBILE IF YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDS ON A PHONE!!!!

Userlevel 1

I live in COLORADO where maybe the mountains in DENVER ARE TOO HIGH for t-mobile to even think about fair reliable service!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PISSED OFF AGAIN

Userlevel 7
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What's sad is most carriers have the same verbage in their terms and conditions

It's basically an out for the carrier. I suggest reading the terms and conditions of any carrier you are planning on switching to.

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Yes, I can agree. I just past my 1 year anniversary and I can say I do not like any product or service of tmobile. Support is terrible. I have been told for the entire year that my tower (home address) is being “upgraded”. As if that would explain anything. A year? I have read recently in the NEWS that tmobile support makes this claim to get customers off of their back. This claim was made by a former tmobile employee. I tend to believe the new story. I find it difficult to believe that an upgrade to a tower takes over a year to complete. They continued this same claim when I filed a complaint with the BBB as well. Network speeds crawl most of the time, and get significantly worse in the evenings.  Home internet and cell is not the same speeds at the same locations. Home internet is a poor product I would not recommend to anyone. I CAN make phone calls and send text messages. Coverage in my state of WV is spotty… but so are all carriers here. Claims of the fastest, best and so forth in my opinion are lies. It depends on where you are! In WV all carriers are terrible. Not fast, not well covered, and not stable. Support is friendly but difficult to understand (Indian accent) for me. Answers are always the same. Promises to improve, fix, etc. that NEVER are followed thru. EVER. I mean NEVER-EVER. That is the definition of LIE. Coupled with the “upgrade”: Tmobile lied to me when they state that the upgrade will improve my service (it is never going to be completed-if it ever existed). Lied when they said I would have great coverage. Lied when they said my network 5G would be blazing fast. Lied when they said they had the best support (third party). Lied when they said my home internet would be 5G speeds. On and on. Such a pain to switch tho. Just one lying company to another? Look: if you just want a phone and a text message… anyone will do. This network garbage is all just that: garbage. Your ISP should never be a cell carrier… period. Get cheap service for a call and go elsewhere for everything else is my best advise. 

Userlevel 1

fireguy...you missed an important point.  T-Mobile was excellent when we first signed up, much better than Verizon, better reception, better clarity.  At some point that changed and ever since then we only get one bar on our mobile phones and often get dropped calls, sometimes at the most inopportune moments.  If TMO changed towers and their new infrastructure is blocked from my area that would explain why nothing they say or promise improves the reception.  Seems they need to find additional towers or find a technological improvement to actually respond to the many complaints about bad reception on this post. 

They guarantee coverage but they don't guarantee connectivity is their fcc response.  They have too many customers. The FCC and FTC don't care. 

Userlevel 7
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Luckily where I've lived the service has been good if not great. When I moved across the country a few years back I streamed music and not too many dead spots. If you ever driven the I-10 in west Texas there's not many towns to stop but I still had a good signal.

I'm over in the Northeast Boston Mass, about 20 minutes north.. 3. Mi from my last address which I had great service... And literally since I moved in June I've had the worst service and internet service ever... I love T-Mobile in their customer service. They are usually willing to do whatever they can! However, not all their techs are trained the same and if you go through the app into the help area to the technical support number, it is actually a different technical support that you get when you just call the basic 611. I had one rep telling me I had absolutely no service in my area and that I should just cancel it. Where it said I have extended 5G 4G LTE range and I can actually see the tower from my bedroom window. I just recently bought a Google Wi-Fi range extender router.. does seem to help. However, because T-Mobile service is still getting a spotty reception, the Google Wi-Fi does go down at least once a day when the Google Wi-Fi is working. It definitely helps increase the T-Mobile router. I used to have the original 5G router that they placed out which was made by Nokia. Absolutely terrible, overheating like no one's business.. I'm constantly getting spam messages.. after switching it definitely made a small improvement.. I understand having some high traffic areas but like other people are complaining when you pay 3 to $400 a month for four lines and internet plus phones on the plan. It's an awful lot of money to put out to have 50/50 coverage! I still even have my old Wi-Fi range extenders from T-Mobile to help draw even more of a signal in which they don't even offer anymore... Lol it's tough. One technology is changing like this.. But at the end of the day they really should be offering people that have to call more than three times a month to deal with internet issues.. The person that helped me last had me do something a little bit different. This time They had me unplug my router and keep it unplugged while they can figured my network from the other end. Once they were done then I plugged my router back in and it seemed to help improve slightly for sure... But still 60/40 is not that much better than 50/50 lol

I hope they get this figured out soon because if this persists, I can see a class action lawsuit happening in the future! You can't take people's money without guaranteeing something.. or what's the point of having the service in the first place? At the end of the day, not every single contract is going to stand tall. It's going to be on the side of the consumer eventually! But at least they have really excellent dedicated technicians and people willing to go out of their way to help you on the other line. That's the one thing I can say about how much I love. T-Mobile is their customer service is good!

I remember back in the day starting out at a kiosk with cellular one which eventually became singular wireless and then turned into AT&t... That service was pure s***..lol call you after 9:00 when it's free 🤣🤣

So I think I'm a little more appreciative of the changing technology and everything going on. However, it would be nice to see better service all around! 

I’m a new customer, and after two months I’m done! HORRIBLE coverage. HORRIBLE. I’m ready to pay whatever fees I need to just to go back to my previous carrier. It was cheaper and I NEVER had the issues with coverage that I have with T-Mobile. 

I was a previously happy Sprint customer with no problems. I was not only forced to move over to T-mobile but I also had to put out $1300 for an iPhone 13 Pro just to be compatible with their 5G network. At first it wasn’t too bad, sometimes a little slower. But within the last week or two, I am down to 1 bar, a warning will pop up that I am not connected to the internet (my home internet is switched off on my phone), it takes forever to load an internet page if it loads at all and messages take a long time to load. What is going on? This is so frustrating!

BYW I live in the North East USA.

I have the same problem, switched to iPhone 12 and currently sitting in an Ultra 5G area with 1-2 bars of LTE no matter where I go in my house. How is this possible? I’d be happy with even 4 bars of LTE at this point. What a rip off. 

Userlevel 7
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I decided to stop complaining about T-Mobile’s coverage when I could use my phone in Chadron, NE*. That happened, via roaming agreements, many years ago.

*Selected as being very out-of-the-way.

Userlevel 1
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All mobile networks have dead zones, and I understand that, HOWEVER, it is outright fraudulent to publish maps claiming coverage exists where it does not.    If anyone ever starts a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile/Sprint, I would sign up the first day because I am tired of paying for empty promises.

Sign me up and let's put them out of business

I've been having issues with my T-Mobile service since I switched over to their Magenta Max plan + got a new iPhone 13 Pro. Now I only get reception if it shows the bars AND also specifically shows 5G UC. If it shows 5 bars and says only "5G" or LTE or anything else, I get absolutely no data reception. The bars don't mean anything anymore.

Their customer support has been no help. They always start by checking the coverage in my area (San Francisco) and tell me there are no outages, and then tell me to restart my phone, which usually does the trick, but it happens so frequently that it's a huge pain to have to restart every time I don't get data reception. They are unable to provide any other insight into the issue.

If anyone is reading this while shopping for a new carrier, AVOID T-MOBILE! Go with a different, more reliable carrier.

It is unfortunate many phones are not compatible with 5g. Even though we are promised so much, much of this frustration would be solved just changing the mobile network setting to LTE/3G or 2G. No need to boast about 5G so much. Help make customers happy by showing them that setting and let them try 5G later on their own. Where I live simply does not have it and it would have made no difference to me leaving it on the most successful setting. Everybody will understand 5G is not available everywhere much more happily than not getting what they are promised.

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