I’ve had the Home Internet service for 3 months now and I’m generally happy with it, but one thing is rather annoying. The external IP address that gets assigned to my gateway keeps changing. This has two side effects. Web sites for CCs, banks, etc remember the IP address that you last used to connect and if it changes, they will require additional verification. The other problem is with streaming TV services. The local broadcasts that I’m allowed to watch will depend on where they think that I’m located. My estimated location usually depends on my IP address and in the last month this has changed 4 times! My IP address location has changed from Kansas to Oklahoma, to Texas and today it thinks I’m on Ohio!
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yeah if im remembering right any home net that is sent/received via a tower wont have a static IP address..pretty sure its the same for starlink. ATT is via cable so you’ll have a static IP there..ditto with Comcast...
When I do that I get told my IP is “likely” static:
What do you guyes see for that when you visit that site?
Regarding that “Likely Static” message...I am presently connected to an AT&T fiber network and it says the same thing for me...so I don’t think it’s a reliable indicator.
... a guy there suggested taking my T-Mobile gateway router/modem and plugging in another router to the gateway. He said this will give me a static IP address. Is there anyone savvy enough to have an opinion about doing this?
This may give you a static internal (LAN) address, but it won’t affect your external IP address that the rest of the internet sees. That happens between the gateway and T-Mobile’s WAN, and due to the nature of the TMHI infrastructure, that’s gonna change when it’s gonna change. Forum members report that if you get a business account, you can pay extra for a static external IP address, but there are some downsides to business accounts; e.g., some people have reported that they block streaming entertainment services.
That said, changing IP address every few seconds is not the “normal” IP address change we typically see. Those changes usually occur less frequently, and often when something changes, like rebooting the gateway or the gateway changing 5G/LTE bands. Problems with lease timing, as suggested above, could be at fault, but renewing a lease every few seconds is abnormal behavior, and because our gateway firmware is so locked down, we can’t get to those settings.
Contacting TMHI service by phone is a crap shoot, and more often than not gets someone using a script who doesn’t really understand telecommunications very deeply at all. Search on this forum for T-Force via Twitter or Facebook--people seem to have much better luck contacting service that way. I now avoid the phone and go straight to Facebook chat with T-Force. The reps I connect with actually do seem to understand telecomm concepts, even if they can’t always resolve my issues.
... a guy there suggested taking my T-Mobile gateway router/modem and plugging in another router to the gateway. He said this will give me a static IP address. Is there anyone savvy enough to have an opinion about doing this?
T Search on this forum for T-Force via Twitter or Facebook--people seem to have much better luck contacting service that way. I now avoid the phone and go straight to Facebook chat with T-Force. The reps I connect with actually do seem to understand telecomm concepts, even if they can’t always resolve my issues.
going the social media route lands you with tier 2 support instead of the call in tier 1 support.
Userlevel 1
Just checking in on this as there are a few threads discussing the same thing. Has there been any resolutions/solutions posted by users or T-Mobile through the various months and year this problem has been posted?
FYI, in my area of Minneapolis, this issue appears to be resolved.
Mike
this is NOT a Static IP and never will be..
Userlevel 4
+4
I have the same problem with the changing IP that I’ve touched on in my main thread.
Usually I only got a new IP when my device rebooted. But I recently had my IP change without a reboot so I’m going to keep an eye on that to see how often it happens or if it was a fluke. As for the location I don’t think it’s reliable at this point in time. I’m in Kansas but anything that uses geolocation by IP thinks I’m in Texas. That’s for T-Mobile to fix and I don’t know if they ever will.
Not only is my IP address changing frequently but my mac address is now changing as well! I too had a third party router set up to take the load off of my Sagemcon and all of a sudden it is not running as a stand alone router anymore. Also, the Sagemcon shows all devices as being connected even though they no longer are. Reset doesn't take any off the connected list either. Anyone else experiencing these problems?
I have made 7 different calls to Hulu in the last 30 hours, due to the error page that says that it looks like I am not at home. My i.p. Address has changed multiple times. Each time, I am asked if I just traveled to Belleview WA, or Kansas, etc. or moved from one of the many places. 3 times today I have called in & each one tries to override those locations, and once again, they have to take all of my info, & build me back in. This is a well known T-Mobile problem. I had trouble with this when I first got the Gateway for a week or so, then for the 6 months there was no problem with THAT issue. Now, suddenly, I’m back at square one. Had I known that TM does not interface with Hulu, had I known that the speeds would fluctuate so wildly, & that the service would drop at least twice a day, if not more, I never would have signed up. The last month, at least half of the mornings we woke up to no internet. I have unplugged this modem & rebooted it countless times. Of course, the gateway always says my connection is Good! They clearly were not ready for load on the cell network. I have heard dozens of excuses about the engineers accidentally moving me from one tower to another, blah, blah, blah. Troubles have been escalated to 2nd tier, but no one ever calls back. I have been looking into other isps, like Xfinity, & it seems that even though it has some issues from time to time, it’s far better than this, & a lot faster. I am DONE.
I’m having issues with my IP constantly changing as well. I get the same added verification requirements as noted above. At work I have to give our IT person my IP address for him to enter into the backend of our system so when I try to login it will see my IP address is already on the “guest list” and then grant me access. Every time the power goes out or I have to reboot the tower it changes. I’m starting to really feel back having to ask him to yet again enter in my new IP address. I would really like to know if there is a IP range they are using for my area so I can provide that to my IT person keeping him from having to manually enter in each new IP address - very annoying.
my google weather app weather.com is forever changing locations…..I can only attribute this to the fact that I’m on T-Mobile Home Gateway (i.e. wireless internet)…. otherwise not having much of a problem with location/ip...
I also had been seeing the frequently changing public IPv4 address. However overnight something must have happened in my area because this morning my public IPv4 address has been stable for several hours. Hope it stays this way.
The XLAT464 implementaton they used for dual-stack IPV4/V6 support on their IPV6 only network functions in some ways like a VPN ser vb ices
Short lease times, and each time you reconnect the public IP can change--and it may even be shared with more than one client as well, which can make it behave somewhat like CGNAT as well.
Some issues might be resolved via IPv6 passthrough with a dedicated router (provided the applications/devices are IPv6 capable/aware), or a VPN service. YMMV depending on what options are available, but about the only things available for most peopleuntil TMO changes things in layers above the modem.
I have had TMobile for about 6 mo. Was fine at first. Then when I tried to use our schools gradebook it would constantly take me back to the login screen. I have seen others post about not undefined, undefined… I had that as well.
After reading all the “potential” problem solving solutions. I have tried almost all except for getting the business acct. Which is what I was also told when I called TM.
Long story short… whomever suggested tethering your phone with a hot spot and a VPN… it worked. Well, after a couple of tries because of having the exact setting on the phone. But I can now log in and save grades from home. Not convenient, but it is working.
I just switched to T-Mobile 5G internet service 3 weeks ago from years wirh CenturyLink DSL.
The speed is definitely an upgrade, however, I came upon 2 problems.
1. My HP Printer would not accept the PW from my T-Mobile router. I had to create a new Gateway which fixed that problem.
2. When trying to upload new files, music to my personal website, my FTP programs could not find the server. After contacting my ISP, they said they found this:
"Please be informed that your WAN IP has been blacklisted by Spamhaus ZEN, refer to the following link:"
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a172.58.79.67&run=toolpage We advise you to contact your Internet Service Provider for assistance.
Tech support for T-Mobile ran a check and have no answers for my IP being blacklisted. But upon further communications with T-Mobile, they told me this 5G internet has a "dynamic" IP address (forgive me if I'm not exact) and not a "static" IP address. And cannot be made to have a static IP address.
Bummer. I NEVER had these issues for 20 years before changing to T-Mobile. Looks like I'll be looking for another internet company unless someone has any suggestions.
MD
I finally suffered through an hour-long call with T-Mobile. They said there is no fix. Our T-Mobile Home Internet routers jump back and forth between towers like a phone. There will never be a fix, she said.
I asked why the problem just started for me a month ago. She said the IP situation has always been like this but websites recently started cracking down due to security concerns.
As you know, their answer is not accurate. I’ve had this service for almost 2yrs now and this problem only recently started. I know prior to this that it held the IP for several days, even months, so long as you didn’t reboot. I can deal with the IP location always being states away, that’s just an annoying. This however, makes the service unusable for the work I must do from home as I can’t complete authentications without the IP changing in the middle. This is not normal behavior and sites see this as a possible security event (think man in the middle attack).
The support I talked to also tried to pass this off as normal. They seem to now have a shared response to provide us. They did let on something about “bands” and tower saturation being involved. My guess is another poster is on to something that the change to 5G towers and infrastructure, along with more people, is contributing to T-mobile now having an architecture that is unable to manage the demand.
Btw, their recommendation for a google mesh router will not fix this problem unless that router is configured to utilize a VPN service that can stabilize your public side IP address. You have to pay extra for that and adding a VPN overlay network on top can add additional latency, causing other problems.
This is a horrible development in an otherwise good service - especially for those of us in rural areas with no options.
t-Mobile if you guys follow this, yes, your current explanation is incorrect. Otherwise networking would not work at all… for a TCP session/connection to work, the IP address must remain constant… otherwise the video streams would be constantly interrupted, and it would be non-stop disconnect chaos. Your mobile phone technologies have solved this problem a long time ago with mobile IP and the ability to move an IP address around through towers as a persons endpoint changed location.
Note to people saying this is nature of the beast unless you have static IP.. Nope. This is not dynamic vs static IP address problem. Even with dynamic IP address your IP address will usually stay consistent for the entire time your device is connected to the network…. when you go to get your DHCP lease renewed, you will usually get the same IP address back.
This problem also appears to be somewhat related to the Minneapolis area, as many of the initial complaints are from people in the Minneapolis area, or whos GEOIP location for their IP address maps to Minneapolis area.
My guess as to the source of the problem appears to be IPV6 to IPV4 Nat translation. The bulk of our devices on mobile networks get an IPV6 Address (I do not know how to confirm this with my Nokia gateway as it does not appear to be presented in the app, even under diagnostic data. My phone however gives both a IPV4 address (192.0.0.x) and an IPV6 address: 2607:fb90:Fa1C:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:XXXX:XXXX 8 (My phone browser or hotspot has the same issue as the home internet gateway)
If I do a google search of sites to give me my IP address, there are of course number of them. Open 5 to 10 of them up in different tabs in your browser and book mark the tab set. Then close your browser. Open the browser again, and open all tabs in the folder you saved the tab set to. You will note that in spite of all of them opening within seconds of each other, most of them will tell you you are coming from a different IP address.
My theory is that the device takes IPV6 connections from our device and translates it to an IPV4 address for transmission via IPV4 to the destination host, is taking the destination IP address into account in how it maps connections to IPV4 source addresses.. This means for every different destination IP address, the NAT function will potentially give you a different source address (your device address actually remains constant). If you are going to a cloud based solution, there will be multiple destination addresses for that cloud based solution (DNS lookup will return multiple IP address, or change IP address returned with every query) This means from one connection to the next your destination IP address will change, and thus your source IP address will change.
Going back to the test before with multiple tabs, Take note of a reported IP address on a tab and reload it….. You will likely see you will end up with the same source IP address as it gave you the last time…. different from the rest of the tabs…. This is a clear symptom of this problem.
I believe this a misconfiguration of a core networking device in the Minneapolis t-mobile core or potentially a software bug unique to the Minneapolis infrastructure.
Regards,
Mike
I'm also having problems related to verification with my bank and with Hulu Plus. I ended up canceling Hulu because neither Hulu nor T-mobile had a solution. Now it's my bank. So I went to a T-Mobile store to see if there's anything new regarding this issue with T-Mobile dynamic IPs. Apparently not, but a guy there suggested taking my T-Mobile gateway router/modem and plugging in another router to the gateway. He said this will give me a static IP address. Is there anyone savvy enough to have an opinion about doing this?
I’m only like a half hour into searching that interweb thing for the answer as to why all of my Google Nest devices are going crazy but I betcha this is it. I am not a techie but I might be considered “tech adjacent”. A half hour in and I am done with T-Mobile entirely. Spectrum has better deals at the moment anyways. It’s easier to just change carriers than troubleshoot crap like this. Sorry, T-Mobile, piss off. Hello cable!
There's an easy way to fix this. Unplug the gateway, then tap the reset port on the back with a push pin or paper clip. Slide the power switch off then on for good measure. When the top 3 lights are out and the front light is reddish, plug the power back in. When all the lights are green, the gateway should be reoriented to your local area.
What is happening is that a device within t-mobile is doing NAT (network address translation) and using a different source address for every new connection to a different destination IP address. IT SHOULD NOT BE DOING THIS as it causes problems like this, especially with cloud based servers where the a given DNS host name has multiple IP addresses. The NAT device needs to disregard the destination address in it’s NAT lookup for new connection attempts.
Its not just NAT or CGNAT, its 464XLAT. Meaning your device is actually assigned a real IPv6 address, and issued an IPv4 IP only at the tower’s edge. When you make an outbound connection, a WAN IPv4 address is assigned and translated via your IPv6 connection. This has the effect of an IP NAT pool, but not for the same reasons. A case-study was released where T-mobile claimed to do this as a result of IPv4 exhaustion causing deployment issues. This is more likely a side effect of the exhaustion of IPv4 than a sign of T-Mobile arrogance. Failure to communicate? Sure.
This means IPv4 traffic does not exist between the tower and the edge of T-Mobile network. It is all translated over IPv6. This is likely to become an increasing practice over time as IPv4 is finally phased out.
T-mobile does offer static translation (as Static IP Addon) to fix this issue, but only for business accounts. No clue why, either because T-Mobile literally doesn’t have the 2 million IPv4s needed to handle the 2.0 million new home internet lines added in 2022, or because it’s existing systems can’t support 2 million extra assignments.
So the device has already NAT’ed my address to map between IPV6 and IPV4 with the first persistent TCP connection that is made. Why does the device need to map a NEW IPV4 address for the next connection that goes out? Just lazy software implementation? Even if they have overallocated their NAT pool, the other members of the TCP tuple (source port primarily) should be able to chosen to make the NAT translation unique for a given destination address and port.
Mike
Why do my senses tell me there is a whole lot of illegality with what they’re doing here.
So I’ve been an early adopter of T-Mobile Home Internet before the official release. I have this Nok router and have had to have this thing replaced several times since I first received this one. I probably should have kept the original white router.
Right now I’m dealing with a geolocation issue where if I check on SpeedTest’s website, it says I’m in Puerto Rico all the while I’ve been in Connecticut the whole time. I’ve tried to restart the router several times, I tried to get T-Mobile to release the IP address [they said they can’t do that]. I also play games on my network and a certain app I use requires me to have a more localized IP address. Since Friday [01/27/2023] around 3pm Eastern time I have communicated with T-Mobile’s Home Internet Division several times [I’ve definitely isolated the problem down to the connection] They told me on Saturday [01/28/2023] that it may be conducive to find another provider since they can’t accommodate giving me a static IP address on a non-business account. They also told me that they’ve also replaced this NOK router so many times [even though each time the router stopped working on it’s own within 3-6 months every time] that they would only be able to do one more replacement [I told them to notate that the authorization for a replacement] which concerns me especially since I’ve been a customer for 11 years.
I honestly don’t care if the IP address is static or dynamic, I just want this working once again. And even if it is dynamic, the IP address geolocation shouldn’t be 1,600+ miles away.
This is causing me not to be able to log into my banks that use Netteller becasue the IP is changing mid login. Netteller thinks its a redirect hack. Really annoying. I have to call tmobile to have the reset everything every time, then it works for a week, then stops. Going to have to change provider.
Who was your previous ISP? did you have a static IP address? Ordinarily this is something you pay a bit extra for. The norm is dynamic IP, it will change unpredictably. You need a static IP if you are running your own webserver for example, that’s how the outside world can find you (the DNS system will map your domain name to that static IP).
But for day to day internet use I’ve never heard of people needing a static IP address, most home internet plans are by default dynamic IP no matter who the vendor is, Comcast, TMobile, CenturyLink...
The outside world isn’t calling in to you, you call out to external sites and services and for that we use username/password etc to gain access to them.
This is classic Dunning-Kruger. You think the super-shallow knowledge you have is vast, and presume to lecture people who know more than you do.
The binding of IP addresses to Geography is lucky happenstance that is not legislated or mandated. It is generally offered as a third party service by companies such as Maxmind, who make an effort to maintain their mappings for use by other companies.
The reason it mostly works, is that companies are allocated IP address ranges and generally those ip address ranges are associated with an internet access point somewhere on the globe. The IP address allocated to your region of Connecticut has been assigned to t-mobile. Perhaps t-mobile moved it from Puerto Rico to Connecticut, or perhaps the geo-location vendor mapped in incorrectly.
If it matters to you, contact the webmaster of speedtest and find out who their geolocation provider is. Then contact that vendor to let them know of the incorrect data.
Mike
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