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5G home internet keeps dropping

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I am losing connectivity at least 3-4 times per hour (even more than that sometimes!)

I am very frustrated - thought this would be so much better that what we had before, but I am giving it one more month and if there is no improvement I’m switching back to my old provider - NEVER thought I would say that!

External antennal if you have low signal solved all my issues.

 

BillA
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Log into 192.16812.1 and make sure you are rocking the current firmware (say’s Software) … 1.2101.00.1609.   If not call Tech Support and have them push this update to your Nokia.

Correct placement and orientation also helps, took me months to find the exact best spot, inches can make or break the best connection. I have no alternative ISP so I was forced to learn this the hard way. 

Here in Hawaii my Nokia connects to B2 & N71, huge improvement in speed with the 1609 firmware.  My previous best speeds were 40 down/10 up ... now those are my absolute minimum speeds.  With the built-in WiFi my average is now 80/10. I no longer use the internal WiFi so I turned down the 2.4/5GHz transmission powers to 12%. 

I recently added an Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro SE & WiFi 6 Lite Access point in a double NAT configuration and was surprised to see peaks at 250/70, average 140/40. Until Tmobile gives us bridge mode that’s how I roll my Nokia FG-21. 

I’m now a happy camper with Tmobile Internet. 

 

Dulce est desipere in loco.
N

this service is terrible it has not worked at all lol . most of you at least get it up and running a little i had someone tell me yesterday that 4g towers will soon cease to be working and that we all will eventually have to move to 5g so here i am with a brand new iphone 12 and a 5g home internet service that doesnt work . my advice to you guys is just return it cause no issues will be fixed coming here or calling to that number

R

I am losing connectivity at least 3-4 times per hour (even more than that sometimes!)

I am very frustrated - thought this would be so much better that what we had before, but I am giving it one more month and if there is no improvement I’m switching back to my old provider - NEVER thought I would say that!

P

I’m getting a load balancing router and add another connection. This is ridiculous. tornado season is coming and I need a reliable connection. And if this is not resolved soon I will cancel the service. 

S

I’m having a problem with T-Mobile 5g home internet that has not been resolved despite many calls in to the help line.  I’ve had T-Mobile 5g home internet for almost a month now, and the short version is that every so often the gateway drops the network.  When I say “drop the network,” I mean to say it throws everything off of the Wifi that it’s broadcasting, and anything plugged in via ethernet says “no network found.  (To elaborate this point, cell phones switch to cellular data because wifi is gone for them, and computers hardwired into the gateway think that they are no longer plugged into anything.)  Turning off the gateway and turning it back on resolves the issue, but doesn’t prevent it from happening again.  Whatever is happening doesn’t seem to affect our connection speed/strength when the gateway IS providing signal to devices in the home, but due to the nature of our work, we need a connection that won’t just disconnect randomly.  

 

To address this, T-mobile has so far run a bunch of tests on their end, and seem to have ruled out a tower issue (which makes sense, as the tower shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not the devices on the gateway’s wifi or ethernet connection get thrown off of the network.)  They’ve sent me a replacement gateway, which is experiencing the exact same problem (3 times in the last 36 hours, in fact).   I’ve noticed that the device gets pretty warm, so I set up a computer case fan as a cooler to force air through the device, thinking that perhaps it’s an issue with the device overheating.  However, while the gateway is notably cooler than it was without the fan, it has not prevented the issue from persisting.  The last thing that I can think to do (and my most recent attempt at resolving this issue) is to plug a router into the gateway via ethernet, and allow the router to handle the wifi/connections w/ devices in the house, and to disable wifi from the gateway all together.  Maybe the gateway is simply too overburdened with connections and gets somehow overwhelmed and shuts down, and having the router handle the “heavy lifting” of taking care of all of the individual device connections will resolve it?  I don’t have a great deal of faith that this will fix the issue (as the gateway also kicks ethernet things off of the network when it experiences this problem), but I’m running out of options/ideas of what to do in order to just get a stable, constant internet service.   

 

Is anybody else having this issue, has anybody resolved this issue, or does anybody have any advice or feedback regarding how I might get this resolved so that I can get back to having stable internet?

I am new to internet with T-Mobile. I just switched over. I’m having a terrible time with the internet just dropping. I was hoping to find an answer to this problem. Unfortunately, I see I’m not the only one with problems 

B
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I would install a router and use it for your wifi. Shut off ALL 12 wifi connections in the gateway. Everything that you can. I have not seen a vendor yet that produces a combo modem/router that behaves well, especially with numerous devices or heavy usage. They normally don’t have enough memory or cpu horsepower to do all things required. You will encounter a few quirks with your own router, but in most cases it probably will not be noticed.

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My complaint is about the MiFi hotspot. I purchase this service so that I could work from home having said that I am locked into a two-year contract for service that I cannot use. I am lost for words. I called support only to be told that there are two towers down and that I am on a tower in the middle and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday. Well I start training Monday morning and cannot even connect to the Internet so I guess it’s too bad for me🤬

 

There is no contract it’s month to month what are youtalkingg about two year contract???

You can cancel anytime you want no contract no penalty.

Have you used the searchfeaturer to see how to fix your issue? Have you tried different places? If you had you would know that moving the can a few inches makes a difference.

 

W

My complaint is about the MiFi hotspot. I purchase this service so that I could work from home having said that I am locked into a two-year contract for service that I cannot use. I am lost for words. I called support only to be told that there are two towers down and that I am on a tower in the middle and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday. Well I start training Monday morning and cannot even connect to the Internet so I guess it’s too bad for me🤬

W

HWhat are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

So I just lost the b71 tower and I didn’t have a drop thanks to my primary tower. I keep leaning towards it somehow being a heating issue. Either way I’m probably gonna ask for another device to swap out with and see how that goes. I’m at a loss of what it could be at this point. Thanks for your help, I’ll let you know when/if I decide to get that external antenna you showed me via DM.

S

I had another thought or two about troubleshooting this. You have clients upon the ASUS and still have LAN 2 for leverage. The Roku test was informative but what about connecting a small gigabit switch to LAN 2 and using a client or two multi-homed in effect. You could use the investigation client(s) with wireless to the ASUS and have an Ethernet connection to a switch on LAN 2. If the client has issues hitting the internet through the ASUS then disable the wireless and enable the Ethernet port and check results. Maybe take a client and the Nokia router with the 2.5 Ghz wireless on a different SSID and look at results from that angle as well. The Asus ac68u has four Ethernet ports as well as the 802.11ac so take advantage of the physical ports on the ASUS as well. Test and verify. If you have a client with multiple Ethernet interfaces and plenty of resources stand up some virtual machines as well. Linux  would provide yet another data point and physical Ethernet LAN ports tend to just work with Linux. Lots of tools in the Linux environment to play with. Use different clients, Apple, Windows, Linux, Android, Raspberry PI clients. OK maybe I am making assumptions but today it is not uncommon to have all of the above. 

Another parallel investigation you can do is leverage your cell phone and if it is an Apple iPhone put it into field test mode. See if it communicates to the same tower as the Nokia router by confirming both report the same PCI values for the tower signals. Android phones have applications for tower location so yet another option. If you have not yet used cellmapper.net to validate the location of the tower your router connects to i highly recommend doing so. It is simple enough to use and very informative. What cellular channels are you linking to? How strong and clean are the signals? Do the cellular signals bounce/change from one channel to another? Do any of the local devices record errors or drops? Profile the behavior in detail. Focus on any device that can be influential and stands out but keep an open mind on other actors in the path.

Use the web searches to get ideas but focus on the facts. The values and behaviors you can confirm. Don’t overlook all the tools you can put to work. Keep notes and analyze the operation in a systematic periodic manner. 

The objective: Determine with more certainty where the problem resides. Look at the physical layer before you go up the stack. 


thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. There’s a lot to unpack there and I know I don’t have the wisdom or time to get that deep in to this.

 

getting the right dns config on the asus seems to have resolved the issue for me, at least for the last ~36 hours  

 

you mentioned you’d not tried the Pi-hole, it will only takes a couple of hours to set up and will improve your browsing experience. Two tips - don’t go wild adding a bunch of blocklists; get the iOS “pihole remote” app to go along with it  (stats are interesting and it offers the fastest way to temp disable the Pi-hole or add exceptions)

 

W

What are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

For the primary, the PCI is ALWAYS 308, that’s the B66 tower. It never changes, the primary tower is by far the most consistent connection I have had. I can’t even recall a time it said I had no connection other than when I took the sim card out to try and cool it down. If I could even just disable the secondary tower I probably wouldn’t have drops at all, but that would sacrifice speed from n71.

It’s the secondary one that’s always flakey. As we have established, the cells on the second one occasionally change between the two. There’s no rhyme or rhythm between when it’s on one or the other.

In terms of the RSRP, RSRQ and SNR, the primary tower is stable unless it’s raining. Even then I don’t actually lose connection.

The secondary one shows quite a bit of noise. RSRQ is usually -14, and the RSRP ranges between -110 to -119, or dropping all together. SNR is usually 0, sometimes -2. Sometimes 1.

iTinkeralot
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You are probably right about the single tower. If you can get a picture of the tower and the radio configuration we could try to identify the equipment on the tower. In such a small farming community adding an additional tower does not seem like it would be an economic choice for T-Mobile unless they have leased space on the other tower and have a more economical solution. I would think they would leverage the existing tower space vs adding yet another tower.

iTinkeralot
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What are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

W

I have seen with my router when the secondary signal drops there will be a disruption for 2-3 minutes. The router does not handle the transition from 4G LTE to 5G NR well. That is my take. 

The change between 184 and 261 on the tower. Interesting. Notice the reported cell direction N 16 degrees and N 0 degrees. You need to look at your position in relation to that tower. Cell mapper reports three cells on that tower. The red dot suggest unverified tower. I have looked to try to find the tower on Google Earth via sat images but it is transparent or no image exist with it included. Probably more uploaded data would help solidify the GPS info on that tower.

It might be helpful to have a call with T-Mobile support and just bring that up. There could be work being done on the tower or there might be some issue with the equipment. If they dont get calls on a given tower I would guess they take it to be good to go.

My trashcan has never reconnected to the secondary tower on it’s own after I lose connection. I have waited a 5 minute period and I had never gotten reconnected without rebooting. I’ll give it 10 minutes on the next drop to see if it eventually reconnects on its own.

I’m the only one in my area that seems to be driving off of the main road. I’ll probably drive around where there’s no data on the roads around town and see if I can help get a better sense of that unverified tower. Again, my guess is that the location is wrong, and that there’s just one big tower in town. I’ll keep an eye out though.

Also, the only window I have facing S. that direction is in our bathroom, which wouldn’t be a good place considering the moisture and the general awkwardness. I have tried placing it next to the wall facing South but I didn’t have a stable connection to the second tower nearly at all, and much less of a connection to the B66. That’s where I’m really thinking a external antenna would be a lifesaver to a stable connection to the 5GNR.

E
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@jlillard it fluctuates. Anywhere between 60 and 220 down, and 8 and 35 up.

You are lucky. My DL speeds are consistently below 10 Mb/s. I spent 3 hours today mostly on the phone installing a replacement gateway, switching out 3 SIM cards and 2 gateways. My LTE phone is consistently showing 18-30 Mb/s DL. I’m 1.5 Km from my assigned tower. Gateway has 4 bars of signal. Primary is 4 bars, secondary 3 bars. 

iTinkeralot
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If you describe the behavior and can provide data on what you have seen it might just help get someone to look closer at it. I am sure support would have to pass that on to the engineering team.

iTinkeralot
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I have seen with my router when the secondary signal drops there will be a disruption for 2-3 minutes. The router does not handle the transition from 4G LTE to 5G NR well. That is my take. 

The change between 184 and 261 on the tower. Interesting. Notice the reported cell direction N 16 degrees and N 0 degrees. You need to look at your position in relation to that tower. Cell mapper reports three cells on that tower. The red dot suggest unverified tower. I have looked to try to find the tower on Google Earth via sat images but it is transparent or no image exist with it included. Probably more uploaded data would help solidify the GPS info on that tower.

It might be helpful to have a call with T-Mobile support and just bring that up. There could be work being done on the tower or there might be some issue with the equipment. If they dont get calls on a given tower I would guess they take it to be good to go.

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W

OK so that is helpful!

I can see the 5G NR n71 is delivered from the tower on the other side of town. That is where your router links to for the secondary channel.

See the screen shots attached. Both the 5G NR and 4G LTE towers are there. Close to one another but not from the same tower.

Correct. And my secondary connection keep swapping between two cells on the 5GNR tower, and those cells are 261 and 184. I’m hoping that an external antenna can penetrate through the thickness of the trees. The way I am seeing it is, if my trashcan can get a n71 signal on its own, then an antenna should be able to help.

 

Funnily enough, as I was writing this message, the internet dropped. 

 

Uptime from the last drop: 5h, 7m, 30s

Temperature at the top of the grill: 87F

Noticeable difference: Secondary connection wasn’t connected, however primary was. I don’t understand why there’s this inability to keep the internet going even though the primary tower connection still exists. Makes me wonder if there’s a handoff issue when the secondary tower drops off while the primary tower never disconnects?

A reboot from the gateway panel fixes it, like usual. Also, every time I reboot it has no issues connecting to the secondary tower. Another thing I find odd.

Not long before this, my wife started a large download for a 15GB game update for Black Desert Online. Just wanted to mention it incase it oddly has something to do with a massive influx of packets or if a massive load of data being transferred is somehow affecting it.

So here’s round 2 of images:

 

iTinkeralot
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OK so that is helpful!

I can see the 5G NR n71 is delivered from the tower on the other side of town. That is where your router links to for the secondary channel.

See the screen shots attached. Both the 5G NR and 4G LTE towers are there. Close to one another but not from the same tower.

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iTinkeralot
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Keep in mind a call to T-Mobile support and a direct question will probably get you the answer to the tower location. They know, they can see where your router associates. They have the PCI information and can provide the coordinates to the tower. They did for me. If you call in first thing in the morning that is the best time I found. If they are busy and the automated message prompts you for a call back in 10-15 minutes just opt for that. It works well. I just did all the background work with cellmapper.net and using my iPhone in field test mode to really solidify the data. If I decide to get the external MIMO YAGI antenna it will be ~$300 to have the lightning arrestors and the entire ball of wax. I wanted to be 100% so I could get the best solution. 

W

With the trees an external MIMO panel antenna might help out quite a bit. If you can get the n71 stronger sure that would make it more satisfying. Your router records B66 and n71 so the cell info in the second image with site 3154402 reports NB B71 but does not provide the PCI for 100% verification. I am not convinced that is quite the same. The n71 5G NR is an extension of the 600 MHz bands to enhance the 4G LTE by swapping out part of the banding to leverage the 5G. It depends upon the operation. If they are swapping 10 MHz of 4G for 30 MHz of 5G on n71 then that is where you would get a significant boost. To be 100% you really have to know the PCI of each band and identify the tower that has that PCI, physical cell ID. With the web version on my client at home using cellmapper.net I was able to get the low down on both the 4G and the 5G signals. The phone may not report or connect to the same towers as the router. It can be somewhat helpful but the PCI is important to have. Once you are 100% on the tower delivery to the router then you can really dial it in. An external antenna might help considerably but would have to be located properly to really make it rock and roll.

So that last Cellmapper picture from my phone that occasionally shows the red dot I was able to pull up on the Cellmapper website. When you click on the red dot, one of the PCI cells matches the PCI for my secondary connection on my trashcan (n71). Link Here

 

But with the first picture, the green dot closest to me does not show the same PCI for any of the cells for my secondary connection. Link Here

 

So I have one of two guesses. Either the first link is on the tower to the second link and just inappropriately placed. Or there’s a tower I’m missing when I drive by, perhaps on top of a building or something.

 

Seeing as though I live in the middle of nowhere in a rural farming area, I’m thankful to get what I currently can. The only wired option for me is Windstream which at most I can get is 10 down and 1 up.

 

I noticed on the Cellmapper app there’s an option to take pictures for the cell towers, I might try doing that because I have seen under the CellMapper reddit that a lot of people like to try and identify who and what is on each tower.

 

Anyways, I’m going to keep an eye out for the next time internet drops and I’ll update as I get more information. Thanks for your help Tinker, hopefully the techs are reading this and are able to get some kind of idea on what might be going on.

iTinkeralot
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There is also a 4G LTE 71 channel and it is in the 600 MHz range but it comes down to the way the band is sliced up and what parts are used for the upload and download transmissions. It is a rather complicated subject. There are many aspects of the way the carriers handle the signals that I am not knowledgable of. I am just trying to learn more about the technology so I can optimize the solution I have here. I just still enjoy trying to help other users get the solution working. Every single solution is just a bit different. Some very different one from another. There is a great deal to learn about cellular transmissions. I am sure much more than I will ever be able to understand but learning is fun.

iTinkeralot
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With the trees an external MIMO panel antenna might help out quite a bit. If you can get the n71 stronger sure that would make it more satisfying. Your router records B66 and n71 so the cell info in the second image with site 3154402 reports NB B71 but does not provide the PCI for 100% verification. I am not convinced that is quite the same. The n71 5G NR is an extension of the 600 MHz bands to enhance the 4G LTE by swapping out part of the banding to leverage the 5G. It depends upon the operation. If they are swapping 10 MHz of 4G for 30 MHz of 5G on n71 then that is where you would get a significant boost. To be 100% you really have to know the PCI of each band and identify the tower that has that PCI, physical cell ID. With the web version on my client at home using cellmapper.net I was able to get the low down on both the 4G and the 5G signals. The phone may not report or connect to the same towers as the router. It can be somewhat helpful but the PCI is important to have. Once you are 100% on the tower delivery to the router then you can really dial it in. An external antenna might help considerably but would have to be located properly to really make it rock and roll.

W

Do yourself a favor and use www.cellmapper.net to learn where the T-Mobile towers are. Record the information about the ones close to or around you with attention to the PCI (physical cell ID). If you go into the router with the web UI at 192.168.12.1 you will see the primary and secondary channels/signals on the overview page. That will show you the connections and RSRP/RSRQ/SNR values to know the signal strength, signal quality, and signal to noise ratio. Then go to the status page and record the band, and PCI information from the primary and secondary signal reporting. If you proceed to the “statistics” page you can select cellular and record the statistics there. See if there are packet errors or packet drops. If you have problems using cellmapper.net open a call with T-Mobile support and ask them point blank where is the tower my router is serviced by. They have the PCI information and can tell you the coordinates of the tower. You can use Google Earth and a drive about to confirm what you know and get a good ideal how to improve matters. Use your phone to locate the tower. If you use an iPhone put it into field test mode and read the PCI value it knows. Chances are both may use the same tower. It is not a given but a good datapoint. 

With the PCI information for the primary and secondary channels and the bands used you can use the information from cellmapper.net to determine where the tower is that sends to you. With this and some testing you may be able to better locate your router. Watch out for metal screens or buildings in the path to the tower. If a window has a screen that is metal either put the router above the screen or remove the screen from the window to prevent shielding of the signal. Don’t just rely upon the bars on the top of the router. They are actually rather generic as vendors don’t have a MUST directive for how to deal with those but a recommended use. One feature of the LED display on the top of the router is the alarms. If the router does have temperature issues it will or should report an over temp alarm. The only way I have seen to get the alarm is to use the LED display on top of the router. Forget the mobile application it is about as useful as well blah… It is very unreliable and not much value. 

If you only have say the 5G signal dropping from time to time it could well be T-Mobile engineers are working on the equipment on the tower in your area and that is the cause not the router itself. I highly suggest to not just accept mediocre service but talk with T-Mobile support engineers, try the router in different locations, get the information about the tower location and be patient. Record your findings from trying new locations and then dial it in. If you do the same thing, expect the same results. 

If I can help you understand what you see and help you dial it in I am happy to do so.

Oh I have moved my trashcan around the entire property (using an extension cord) and then later on found out that my primary connection is to a tower farther from me, but nearly a direct line of sight (not quite though). The window I currently have it in is the best connection spot I could find after tirelessly moving the trashcan around inside and out.

The band to the primary connection is ONLY B66 (The tower offers no others AFAIK), whereas the secondary connection (Behind a ton of pine trees) is n71 (5G).

For science I don’t mind doxxing myself a bit here.

As I’m writing this reply, here’s my current stats from the gateway:

 

And here is my location in reference to the cell towers:

 

Sometimes, however, I see this on my phone but I have driven to this point and I believe it’s not appropriately placed or was just estimated as a location:

 

 

My next fun project was to try and buy an external antenna and play around with trying my best to increase my signal to the n71 connection. That will have to wait a bit, though. 

 

As long as I’m connected to both, I can reach download speeds between 60-110. When I’m connected to the B66 tower only, it averages a download of 30-40 down.

 

I don’t have any errors on any of the tabs under statistics. I have previously, but not as of my latest reset.

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