Recently installed 5G home internet and it won’t give me the correct location. Google Maps has no idea where I’m at but more importantly my local channels on FuboTV are not showing up anymore. How do I set the location on my 5G Gateway?
Best answer by syaoran
View original
+15
Location for T-Mobile’s 5G service reflects where the signal from the towers connects to ground based servers and infrastructure. This can sometimes be hundreds of miles away and even further. This is how the service works.
So it appears the gateway is returning a location about 50 miles away, which should be ok. Problem is I'm not getting local channels on FuboTV through my Samsung TV.
Put in a support request to FuboTV.
+15
The channels you receive is based on your IP address. Because your IP is being issued 50 miles away. I doubt Fubo will be able to do anything about that.
What a cop out of an answer. T-Mobile’s product is defective. It changes all time time. Today, it is saying that i am 278 miles from where I am located. FIX THIS
This is a deal killer for me. It is very important that I receive local news and CNN (which has also gone missing). Fortunately fibre is coming very soon.
What a cop out of an answer. T-Mobile’s product is defective. It changes all time time. Today, it is saying that i am 278 miles from where I am located. FIX THIS
What a cop out of an answer. T-Mobile’s product is defective. It changes all time time. Today, it is saying that i am 278 miles from where I am located. FIX THIS
Because the signal travels via microwave towers located all over the US, the IP number is what is assigned tae the particular tower. This is not an infrastructure based ISP like ATT, Comcast, and others.
So it appears the gateway is returning a location about 50 miles away, which should be ok. Problem is I'm not getting local channels on FuboTV through my Samsung TV.
Put in a support request to FuboTV.
Your router’s IP can change several times a day, and be a different location every time.
When a company sells home internet, I expect it to be like every other home internet. It's not really my concern that “oh well that's just the way it works”. Like others have said, we rely on accurate location services. If T-Mobile can't provide that, they should stop selling these devices until they get the issue figured out and refund all the people that have wasted their time on this.
When a company sells home internet, I expect it to be like every other home internet. It's not really my concern that “oh well that's just the way it works”. Like others have said, we rely on accurate location services. If T-Mobile can't provide that, they should stop selling these devices until they get the issue figured out and refund all the people that have wasted their time on this.
Your expectations prove you can not be bothered with learning anything. I should imagine there are other aspects of yer life where this causes you grief. I strongly suggest using a provider what’s signal comes to yer house via cable of some sort be it coax or Cat5.
The fault really lies with content providers that rely solely upon third party IP-address based geolocation services to determine location for local channels delivered. IP-addresses say nothing about your physical location other than your country and who owns the IP-address block. IP-address based geolocation services have been inherently inaccurate but worked well with traditional wire-line based services due to the manner in which those carriers assigned IP-addresses by region. Mobile Carriers (with an emphasis on the mobile) don’t have that luxury. Neither do satellite internet providers where your point of presence is thousands of miles away at a Gateway typically.
Nevertheless. some content providers have figured out how to properly address location and provide more flexible mechanisms to endure the proper home location. YouTube TV stands out as a prime example of this. FUBO, Hulu and other that rely on third party IP-address based geolocation services should follow YoutTube TV’s lead.
This is a deal killer for me. It is very important that I receive local news and CNN (which has also gone missing). Fortunately fibre is coming very soon.
NOT a TMO Home net user but i know i have heard of people paying for a static IP to resolve a lot of this..which makes zero sense to me since im with Comcast and dont have these issues..but its been mentioned quite a few times in different threads.
FWIW, I believe TMO only provides static IPs to business accounts, but certainly an option for those wanting to go through that process by contacting a sales agent.
This is going to be a deal breaker if it doesn’t get fixed. I live in Kansas and I get IP’s from Oklahoma City or Dallas or a few other places. They’re definitely not coming from a local tower. I get TX or OK commercials on streaming TV and if I search on Google I get results for these areas. Even if I specify Kansas when searching.
IP addresses don’t come from the towers (as noted above) and unfortunately T-Mobile is unlikely to fix a problem that is not of its making.
+11
When a company sells home internet, I expect it to be like every other home internet.
Unfortunately life is not that simple. For instance, T-Mobile’s Home Internet does not have an inbound IPv4 address and it’s highly firewalled; meaning you can’t run a web or VPN server on this ISP. It’s really like saying that you expect one car to work like every other car, then you buy a Tesla and get angry because there’s no place to fill it with gasoline.
I considered all the pros and cons and got AT&T Fiber Internet because I run a VPN server.
I’ve had the same problem with Google Chromecast TV. I like to watch local news on Paramount + on home projector/basement theatre but only get Denver local and I live in Colorado Springs. Workaround is to pull up Paramount + on Iphone and cast from Iphone to Google Chromecast TV (must be on same wifi network in home). I have Google mesh throughout so wifi is fast. I’ll just do this as service is still cheaper and better than Xfinity was. If it gets to where I want to watch more local TV later I’ll just have to pay an extra $62 a month for Hulu TV. So far I have no desire for cable TV or the like service.
I’ve been using a gateway off and on since March, and one of the things that always makes me turn the cable back on is that the geolocation can be at least 100 miles off. Back in June, the internet thought I was on the west coast instead of the east coast. I wouldn’t call this a deal breaker, yet, but I am paying less than cable and getting less. I should be getting more for my money.
Here is more information to help the Community and hopefully to encourage TMO to fix this. I subscribed to TMO Home Internet 5G about 90 days ago. I have the latest and greatest Gateway device (black box). The service is extremely good. Very good upload, download and latency performance. Better than Spectrum Cable that I dropped. However, I too have a major geo-location headache. The Gateway does not have onboard GPS and does not provide proper geo-location information. I live near Raleigh, NC. My connections are to a tower less than a mile from my home. The connection is routed over high-speed fiber to a hub in Charlotte, NC (Some 3 hours travel away from my home). This means that DHCP assigns me a Charlotte IP address. Hence all web sites and web content providers think I live in Charlotte. YouTubeTV, local stations, weather, mapping software, big-box store locations, everything is out of sync with my real life. YouTubeTV actually cut off my service because they think I’m using the service for too long away from my home location. I have discussed this issue with TMO customer service. They were honest enough to explain and confirm why I’m showing up with a Charlotte IP address. They made no promises to fix it now or at any time in the future. I told them that this is so disruptive to basic internet usage that it is a deal breaker. I like TMO pricing, but the pain level inflicted by this geo-location fail is too much. At this point, I am receiving almost daily offers for internet service from Spectrum at the introductory rate of $49 / Mo. (for 12 months). Since this is basically the same rate that TMO charges, it looks like a better service option because there is no geo-location problem with Spectrum. The only reason I have not switched back to Spectrum is that I hate all the silly pricing games Spectrum plays and generally poor customer service they provide. But Hey, if TMO can’t or won’t provide a proper service or a work around, then that is not good customer service either. All TMO needs to do is look at customer billing addresses to determine a customers home location and grab IP addresses from the correct IP address pool on that basis for all connections. I’m not an IT/Network Engineer, but it seems to me that they could fix this in software if they really want to be the viable home internet provider they advertise to be. Right now they are just turning off customers who may never trust them again. You know what we say, “Trick me once, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me”. TMO, I hope you are reading this. I want to support you, but you have to do better. And I know you already know this. Right now, push out a notification to users telling us that you are fixing this and when to expect it to be done. Not sure how much longer I can tolerate this broken system. Thanks in advance for getting this done!
...YouTubeTV actually cut off my service because they think I’m using the service for too long away from my home location…
I’m not using YouTubeTV yet but I am considering it. I was not aware the IP geolocation could be that big a problem. Thank you for mentioning it.
Fortunately, I did not cancel Spectrum before trying T-Mobile. My plan was, and continues to be, to see how well T-Mobile works before committing to go all the way. This means switching involves turning the gateway off and the Spectrum router on. The biggest hassles is switching my printer manually every time because it can remember only one network at a time. I’ve continued experimenting because thanks to Long Covid, I am no shape to drive to the nearest T-Mobile store and return the gateway. So I keep giving it a chance before inevitably throwing the switches to get back to Spectrum when I can no longer endure the internet thinking I am at least I am 100 miles from where I really am. (There were times when it showed me in Chicago or California. I live in New York State.)
In addition to the geolocation issue, T-Mobile is slower than Spectrum where I live, but otherwise works well. I am using the 5G home gateway to post this message while ‘80s music is playing on my phone’s SiriusXM app. I have used the gateway for dozens of Zoom calls into hybrid martial arts classes. While connecting to the call can take a little longer than Spectrum, it has worked well for the calls. The calls themselves are IPv4, so credit to the 464XLAT/NAT64 tunnel to make those connections. For internet connectivity, the gateway usually works well. There is just this one issue that, like you, I have trouble getting past. Furthermore, I did searches to see if the 5G home gateways offered by Verizon and AT&T have the same geolocation issue and, apparently, they do.
The underlying problem (which also applies to AT&T and Verizon) is T-Mobile is primarily a cell phone provider. While the 5G home gateways have attracted enough customers for Spectrum to make commercials against it by name, this is still something TMO does on the side. If they lose some customers to the geolocation issue, it won’t affect the company’s bottom line, At the same time, it seems the home service has brought in enough money for them to keep doing it for years, through several models of gateways.
WRT providers like YouYubeTV, there probably aren’t enough 5G home internet users for content providers to adapt how they determine user locations to users with IPSs that use a variation of CGNAT that makes accurately determining the location impossible if the user is not living in the same city as the hub they are going through. They will probably not change to accommodate us when the majority of users are probably on cable.
All of which is my long-winded way of saying the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. And while there are valid reasons for it, that doesn’t mean the situation and TMO’s lack of action is any less vexing.
Hey MikeJoe7g. Thanks for sharing. Your conclusion is probably right. Which means that I will probably be going back to Spectrum in Raleigh, NC soon. At least for 12 months, or until their promotion runs out. Then maybe back to TMO long enough to make Spectrum miss me again. Stupid games they play!
One thing that you might like to know about YouTubeTV is that you can override the false geo-location provided by your ISP to reset and restore your account to your actual home location so you get the right channels and more on YouTubeTV. YouTubeTV allows you to use your phone’s GPS to determine your actual location. This works because your phone has GPS and knows your real location unless you have turned off location services. How you do it varies somewhat depending on what device you use to access YouTubeTV, but the method involves going into your profile settings in the YouTubeTV client (for me that is usually on an Amazon FireStickTV) and choosing to set your current location. Then select use my device which will be your phone. At the same time you do that you will need to be in the YouTubeTV app on your phone, in settings, and select to set my current location. Then your proper location will be set on both devices. A YouTubeTV rep taught me this. Of course this won’t get the desired result if you and your phone are not in your home (base) location. I’m not sure how long this location reset will last in the YouTubeTV account as TMO’s false geo-location data may override that at some point. Time will tell on that, but it did let me reset my YouTubeTV account and restore my service to my local channels that I want to see. With YouTubeTV you can use the service when you travel out of base for something like 90 days (but don’t quote me on that as I’m just going from memory) before you must use your service in your base or lose access. So this is just a work around for YouTubeTV and not the real fix that TMO should provide their Home Internet 5G customers as I stated in my last post. I do hope this information will be useful to you MikeJoe7G and the Community at large.
Funny it shows this issue as being SOLVED because someone answered. “Its just how it is”.
We have been using 5G home internet for almost a year now. Works well enough maintaining connection and speed wise for $30 a month. LOCATION is an issue with some streaming services. The IP address changes and so does location along with it as described above. We had YouTube TV and it worked just fine after setup. They clearly use an alternative method to determine location. HULU is broken and their support readily admits it. FUBO works after they set it. I haven’t found a way to fix this. Would be best if T-MOBILE fixed it in their 5G cellular router. YouTube TV also worked well on other device when traveling using internet or starlink. I don’t think YouTube TV cares. They set the location and that is what is used for Local TV no matter where you are.
This could be fixed but T-Mobile does not want to spend the time to do it.
Each home router has a MAC address and all they need to do is assign that MAC address and static IP that is assign to that tower.
I have worked in IT / networking for 30 years, so them saying it can’t be done is BS and frustrating.
I just signed up for the newly launched Amazon AD FREE PRIME VIDEO on 1/30/2024. The fee is $2.99 a month plus tax. Lee County Florida sales tax is 6.5%. I was charged $3.33. $2.99 x 6.5% is 19 cents not 34 so may total should have been $3.18. So I am thinking that this whole T-Mobile Dynamic IP address mayhem is the cause since my IP address is in Miami on Ookla as I write this and was in Boca Raton a half hour before that, both are over 100 miles away from my home address.
I contacted T-Mobile home internet to see if anyone knows anything about the issue and they don’t and said it is an Amazon problem. I had called Amazon first and did not have any luck with Amazon customer service. It is really hard for any call center staff to comprehend that T-Mobile has assigned my internet service an IP address located over 100 miles away and it changes randomly from town to town throughout the day.
So my question is, and one that I will be asking the Lee County Commissioners, if I am paying 7.44% tax, when Lee County’s tax is 6.5, is the tax going to Miami Dade or Orange county when my IP address says I am in these counties and how much are the local governments loosing or gaining?
I will bet that if this ends up being a significant amount of loss for counties with smaller revenue that the government will make someone fix this mess.
In reference to “Papigoes” demeaning post in this thread, the reason I now use T-Mobile internet is because I WAS FORCED TO. I had a Centurylink Landline with DSL internet for 38 years in my rural area as there are no cable service providers, and satellite service blacks out too much with all the thunderstorms. Hurricane Ian decided, on September 28th 2022, to destroy Centurylink infrastructure in Lee County Florida and many other areas. It took Centurylink a month to fix the severed cable a ½ mile down the road and when rain, fog and gusting winds continued to make the internet and phone go out they sent 3 different Century link techs out over 6 weeks to fix the problem and the first 2 said someone needed to come out when the lines were wet, and the 3rd came out once again when the lines were dry and wanted to blame it on my electric fence that was not even working at the time because of Ian and the 30 plus trees that came down and smashed a lot of the fence, even though I had the same phone service that worked just fine for 38 years with the electric fence on the whole time. So I got enraged and cancelled Centurylink and 6 months later around June of 2023 when I called the local Centurylink supervisor{a tech had given me her number} to have someone come raise their cable up, because a Lowes delivery flatbed semi truck could not get on my property because the phone cable was still hanging 10 feet off the ground from Ian {and a call to the Fire Department said they need 12 ½ feet of clearance}, the supervisor told me they don’t like to fix the old copper cables. Supposedly they are running fiber-optic out here in the Floriduh swamp but no one knows which century we will have service.
I found out through lots of research in the weeks after Ian that a $1300 purchase for a Long Ranger cell antenna with a 20 mile range, and a Cel Fi GO X 32 signal booster would give me 5 bars of 5G in my metal mobile home, instead of the 1 bar of dropping service I got outside and none in the home, and I could do the troubleshooting and fix things myself rather than always have to wait hours, or days, or weeks, or months for the idiots form Centurylink to fix things. One time it took 6 months for them to figure out they needed to replace the buried cable from the road to the home which was over 300 feet long.
Dealing with this ongoing B.S. is a royal pain in the arse.
Someone left this answer
Location for T-Mobile’s 5G service reflects where the signal from the towers connects to ground based servers and infrastructure. This can sometimes be hundreds of miles away and even further. This is how the service works.
But no, this not how 5G works. This is how 4G works.
I'm sure if Homeland Security wants to know your device exact location down to 50 ft, T-Mobile home Internet will be able to provide that info.
T-Mobile: The problem is understandable. But why can there not be a way to PIN a Lat/Lng to the Server for location purposes like this?
Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.
