After 5 months of subscription, I have no option but to say good-bye to T-Mobile Internet.
I have substantial investments in the service, both in time and money with high hope that it would work for me. I bought a Waveform 4x4 antenna that gave me a pretty solid performance until 3 weeks ago when things started to fall apart.
It began with speed reduction. I used to get 150mbps up and 25mbps down but it was reduced to 50% or less. If it had been just slower, I would have tried to do something more, such as moving the antenna to get better reception or just lived with it. But it also started to have random disconnects, particularly during the day. I downloaded a network monitoring tool to see how bad the situation is. Yesterday afternoon between 3-4pm, it has 5 disconnects, lasting from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.
I am using a VPN to log into my comany’s network to do work. Any interruption of the network, no matter how short the inverval is will result in a reset of the connection. Therefore, 5 interruptions in an hour is totally unacceptable. I brought the data and charts to a T-Mobile store asking for help. Unfortunately, they had neither the tool nor the knowledge to offer any assistance. I didn’t bother to call tech support because in my previous experiences, they were pure waste of time. The store did offer to replace the gateway. But I know that it is not a hardware problem as it performs just fine in the nights that I observed.
Why am I hopeless aobut the situation? Because I believe that T-Mobile is oversubscribing the network capacity to support their marketing campaign. When the 5G network reaches certain load thresholds, it will start throttling, then dropping data based on the priority of the service. T-Mobile internet is at the bottom of the priority. Therefore, there is no hope for any improvement in the foreseeable future.
So I am planning to get back to comcast, and maybe taking my cell phone service along. I think that T-Mobile internet was a good product, until they totally fail to manage it properly. Sadly it leaves a very bad taste for me in T-Moble in general.