I live in rural southwest Missouri. T=Mobile home internet is the best I have ever had, after trying every system and vender available. I began with “medium” (three bar) signal strength, but over time, that has diminished to “poor”(two bars). The system still works adequately, although dropped connections when the gateway still says “connected” are a much greater problem than before. I was told at one point that T-Mobile had plans to make a new gateway available that had external antenna capabilities. Is anyone familiar with this and are these newer gateway models available?
If your signal strength has degraded over time, and you haven’t moved the router in your house, is it possible that tress have grown in your line-of-sight direction to the tower? If these are on your property, maybe they can be trimmed. Or maybe try re-positioning your router to another location as an experiment, Also, this time of year, vegetation is pretty dense, and some folks have reported better signal in the fall/winter after leaves have fallen.
Certainly can’t argue with that possibility. Spent some “quality time” on the phone with T-Mobile tech support, the goal of which, for me, was to find out more about the rumored roll out of new gateways with external antenna capabilities. After running through the usual shutdown and reconnect process, the tech asked what my signal level was. Exactly same as before, then we were “magically” disconnected for lack of activity, although previously to that, the tech had sometimes taken up to ten minutes to respond to a question or with a comment, and the interaction related to the restart were in intervals of one or two minutes. Seems Odd. And, of course I never received any assurances or information about the next generation of gateways. The tech never tried to re-stablish contact, and I was so frustrated at that point, I went on to other activities.
One other thing I forgot to mention is that if you happen to have your router in a window, you might try opening it. I get about a 10 dB improvement in signal quality when I open my double-pane windows. Of course, you need to mindful of weather conditions if you do that.
Reply
New badge winners
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.