I've had 5G home internet service for about two months, after two weeks it started acting up. For about five times a day all my devices connected to the Arcadyan KVD21 gateway lose internet yet stay connected to wifi, I've tried everything! Do I need to replace my gateway? Very frustrating.
I'm also starting to think they are throttling service. Everything worked fine for months up until about 3 weeks ago. Now my internet drops out all the time which is making it extremely hard to get my work done. Customer service gave me the run around saying the tower was being upgraded the first week.. ok cool.. still happening after they said the tower upgrade was complete. They sent me a new gateway.. still happening with the new gateway but now I'm being told the tower is being upgraded again?
Customer service and their "experts" are a joke! This is getting ridiculous
Hi Melo,
thanks for the reply. I can definitely relate to your experience as it almost matches mine. I was getting very good internet service from Jan. 2022 to around August 2022, and then the wifi/internet would cut off and come back on again after a few minutes, this would happen a couple times per day, then it got worse where it would cut off multiple times per for longer times. I called the so called “experts” and got no where. They sent a new modem (I was led to believe it was a different and better one but it was the same model!), and they changed the account to a lesser (limited data) so this did nothing other than waste my time. The “exeperts” are all from a call center Tmobile has in the Philippines. The people there are nice but they read/play off a script and really just say everything will be fine, we will fix it, and that is all a lie. They cannot fix anything. I then had to return the modem, and went to a Tmobile store and they were useless, just told me to call 611. I called again and the girl gave the same story, oh they are working on the 5g tower and it will be better. They provided no other details, when the work started, what the nature of the upgrades are, when it will be completed, etc. I was suppose to get a 20$ discount but Tmobile charged me extra for the modem that didn’t work so now I need to call them again to fix it. I liked the idea of coupling cellphone and internet for $135 all inclusive per month; the cell service is not great but so far I can live with it (I had ATT previously and they are better but Verizon is the best (and most expensive unless you have multiple lines on account)) but the internet service from this 5g system is not consistent and Tmobile customer service and business is deceptive. I will wait and see if it does improve, but if by January 2023 (1 year of Tmobile for me) it is not better, I am dropping Tmobile.
+8
The problem may or may not be with the gateway. You will have to contact T-Mobile support and ask about the work on the equipment in the area. They could be working on the equipment for the cells in the area so it would be a tower problem. From what you can see the internet connection is not available therefore the cellular connection is a highly probable source of the problem.
One thing you can look at are notifications the gateway may have recorded so check for notifications via the LED screen. Another thing to try would be to power the gateway off and remove and reinsert the SIM card. If there is a problem with the SIM card, which some Arcadyan gateways seem to have, then this might help if it is related. That is why I would suggest to check the notifications for errors related to the SIM card. Reseating the SIM card will not hurt. If you have a T-Mobile phone and both tend to use the same cellular source that might be another clue. If your phone transitions to another cell when the gateway drops its cellular signal then it could be a tower equipment related problem. T-Mobile engineers might be performing work on the equipment in the area. T-Mobile does not appear to provide any customer notifications regarding work being performed on the equipment.
I got home from 10 days of vacation and found that my internet kept dropping out a few minutes after rebooting the router. When I connected a device directly via an ethernet cable the connection time was elongated by about an hour but still would fail. I have opened many service tickets regarding this with no correction. They tell me that they are working through the engineers to correct a software issue but I have found that it is still failing after three days of this continual reboot and use for a short period of time. At this point it fails immediately upon reboot. The device still says it is connected to the Internet although all connected devices to the Wi-Fi or ethernet port say there is no Internet. I am at the end of my rope for how to get this resolved through technical support.
I signed up for Tmobile Home Internet 5G service on 9/7/22 and had no problems during the first 2 weeks. Then, on the 3rd week, I started to notice frequent drops in service. where I would get drops between 7:30am to about 7:00PM. It has progressively gotten worse. Today (9/29), I had a total of 10-15 drops. I can no longer make Zoom or VOIP calls as it frequently cuts off during the middle of the calls.
My daily usage is about 15G per day so about 450G/month. I don’t think this is is excessive but it appears Tmobile is throttling me now.
Ive spoken to Tmobile several times and I tried all their solutions.
Power off the device for 1min and power on - Nope.
Replace the Sagecom Gateway with another one - Nope
Do a factory reset on Home Gateway device. - Nope.
Tmobile representative reset the connection from their end - Nope
We will add more capacity to the tower - Tower is transmitting N71 (600mhz band but low capacity). I am hoping they will add N41 (2.5ghz band with higher capacity). I live about ½ mile away from the tower with direct line of sight so I should be able to receive N41 signals when it become available. Tmobile could not give a ETA for adding N41. I would not hold my breath.
One last observation that has me perplexed. My Gateway is a Sagecom 5688W, I get strong signals (RSRP = -78) but the quality of the signal is poor ((RSRQ = -12) according to Tmobilie. I am going to swap out the Sagecom for the Nokia 5g21 gateway at the Tmobile store to see if it makes any difference. I will add comments after I test this.
I do have a question about the nature of how Tmobile throttles your internet connection. I noticed that the throttling that Tmobile imposes is the following. When in the middle of browsing, getting email, or Zooming, the internet data transfer stops completely but does not actually disconnect. After about 1 minute, it is restored. In fact, I usually run a speedtest after the internet recovers. I get the following result: 125m down and 30 up. Rather than slowing you down, they stop data transfer for about 1 - 3 minutes. This result is worse than slowing your data transfer speed.
In fact, I tested this with another carrier (Verizon hotspot) but it never stopped completely. Rather, data speed was in fact slower.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
The frequent disconnects are annoying when using the internet for working from home. I could handle 1 or 2 discounts late in the day but not multiple discounts throughout the day.
I use Zoom and VOIP calls so you can imagine how inconvenient the frequent disconnect can be.
So for this week (week of 10/10), I am experiencing only 1 or 2 disconnects per day occurring between 5-7PM.
The worst was a week ago in which I experienced 10-15 disconnect instances for several days.
If the tower is congested, I would rather have the bandwidth slowed to around 5mbps rather than being completed disconnected.
I never experienced these kinds of disconnects using AT&T or Verizon. Luckily, have a Verizon hotspot as backup for work.
My home internet started out good for about 6 months, then in the summer it was weaker I guess because of trees/leaves and other interference . Moved the modem around the home to get the best signal. Then after the summer it would always work good in the morning until about 2:25 each day then the kids from other households(no kids in my household anymore) would come home from school and it would disconnect for 20 minutes and then be spotty until 5pm. Called support several times. They finally admitted to a congestion issue that would be solved “soon” which was three months… The bottom line is tmobile is signing up too many customers which drove me to leave. Back to cable and somehow at half the cost for two years. BUT kudos to tmobile and other companies for providing competition to cable to drive down prices.
Custom service was always polite and but if tmobile is signing up too many people then it is pointless service.
This started happening to me back in July. I ultimately had to cancel my T-Mobile home Internet because it just wasn’t working for us. It was nearly flawless for the first seven or eight months of service. Easily over 300 Mbps for all of our (20+) devices. It was a dream replacement for our cable Internet that was just getting more and more expensive. However, no Internet just doesn’t work, so we replaced it with Verizon 4G LTE which is admittedly MUCH slower. Slower, but reliable and always present. That works for us. I am very sad that T-Mobile quit on us. It was great while it lasted. I think that our usage got us bumped off. We routinely used in excess of 1,600 Gb of data monthly. Interestingly, though, during this time our phone’s 5G failed to provide Internet for us. To get an Internet connection with our phones, we needed to downgrade to LTE. 5G would connect, but it wouldn’t provide ANY Internet access. That is clearly unacceptable for a home Internet solution.
+2
What I’ve learned through this is T-Mobile has signed on more people than the towers can handle. As such, there are drops. At this time, there is nothing the support dept. can do except continue to regurgitate the generic script, i.e. working on towers, replace router etc.
Until they expand their systems, drops will continue.
Just called Customer Service for similar issues: 1) Home Internet drops tower connection randomly; and, 2) The iOS Internet app does not connect to my gateway.
Here are the answers I just received from Customer Service.
Regarding the dropped connections: T-Mobile’s internet service is not a secure wired connection like competitors. So a good connection depends on alot of factors. Translation: T-mobile is not as reliable! If you want reliability, get a wired connection.
Regarding the iOS app: That is a known issue. They have no target date to resolve. Find someone with an Android device and use that. Translation: T-mobile does not have the technical skill set (internal or external) to fix an app that provides extremely basic functionality.
Sounds like Tmobile adopted an interesting business model.
+8
The cellular wireless 5G solution is not a simple solution that will work for everyone. Transmitting through the airwaves will always have challenges. A fixed wired solution that is a mature technology is going to be more reliable. Maybe one day cellular technology will evolve to be a more stable and robust delivery system but it does have a way to go yet.
I think it is important to remember that the objective cellular vendors have is to reduce overhead costs and boost the revenue returns for investors. In some markets the solution is working but but as expected not for ALL users. If they focus primarily on the bottom line and don’t attend to the problems it will continue to be inferior. End to end details make great companies. Execution does matter.
I made the decision today to go back to cable internet. I had the service for about 2months. I could no longer tolerate the daily disconnects in the middle of a VOIP call or Zoom session. This was now occurring on a daily basis. Most days 2-3 times but on bad days, 5-10 times or greater.
I replaced the Sagecom 5g gateway twice but that did not solve the problem. I put the Sagecom near a fan to cool the device but that did not solve the problem either (as someone suggested).
On the exit call, I spoke with Tmo representative and he said that they aware of the problem with disconnects. He believes in some areas, Tmo may have accepted too many home users without determining the impact on local lower capacity. Also, he could not give a reliable ETA as to when this problem will be fixed or when they would upgrade tower capacity.
The Tmo service has promise. If they can deliver 60-100mbps down consistently. that would serve my needs especially at the $50 forever price point. Only if they could fix the frequent disconnects. I will check out in 12 months time if things have improved or not.
Fortunately, cable internet offers 12month promo at $50 per month for returning customers. You have to have been a non-customer for an unspecified amount of time. Internet posts says 30 days but others say 90 days. Anyway, I got the $50 promotion back.
I will check out this thread frequently to see if this problem will be resolved at some point so if other users could continue to post their experience.
+8
Preface: I don’t work for T-Mobile. I am just another subscriber.
From the spread of community conversations regarding disconnects & no internet even though the clients appear to be connected; I have seen similar behavior. My experience with both and from what other users have reported relate to a number of possible sources.
If you see the cellular signals connected in the management and the signal is strong then test the DNS by changing/replacing/adding say 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 for Google or Quad9s 9.9.9.9 or pick another. If the client starts getting the internet i.e. the browser pages work well the host names were not resolving. I saw the behavior a week or so ago along with many others.
It seems to be common that support will throw hardware at the “issue” but well that is just a hail Mary pass which is often short. They don’t seem to have a proper play book nor database that they use to work through possible solutions. Users with some knowledge and patience can figure some things out with a little help from the community conversations. Some support engineers are really good and others not so much but that is a common aspect of technical support.
T-Mobile engineering seems to do maintenance and deployments of cellular equipment during the middle of the day anytime that works and there are NO notices provided to customers about possible disruptions. It seems to be the same for new deployments that are not fully worked out. In some cases it is premature it seems and possibly just errors here and there. If there is work being done and the user’s gateway is between cells then when the handoff takes place due to the loss of signal this is another situation where it becomes difficult to know exactly what is taking place IF you are not looking closely at the cellular metrics. If the PCI, physical cell identifier changes well it is clear that the gateway lost its prior connection and moved to another cell. It could be both the primary and secondary frequencies or one of them. It seems to be more common that the 5G signal changes. Regardless it is a disruption and gets frustrating.
Cellular internet with 5G is NOT like a cable solution and has its own set of complications. The upside is the monthly cost for no data cap and no contract and no additional fees and costs for the gateway. The speeds when it is done right are impressive. There are growing pains and it has its challenges. I am not trying to defend it. I am just stating my opinion. Here I have had a few disruptive periods but when things were fixed it became stable again and has been a good solution. It can be a fickle animal though.
I see some comments here that are questionable. Now to be clear, I don’t think T-Mobile is perfect by no means, but the disillusioned people that consider high dollar Verizon the “only” way to go, and the unreliable AT&T farce, T-Mobile certainly stands out. I switched to T-Mobile way back when they were a nobody and began the no contract(un-carrier) craze that forced every carrier to follow. They were definitely the best value, they had you assigned to a fixed customer support location( I live in SC and mine was in Charleston) which was great, and always answered immediately with an English speaking rep. I have never before or since experienced such great support from any company hands down. Now, due to their growth and merger with Sprint, they can(understandably)no longer provide this personal support now, but it will take a lot to get me to move away from them. Now if you wish to pay more and go to a no better solution, all power to you. T-Mobile has the largest 5G network (although others lie about theirs being the largest and the best), the best deals and prices on their service, and my commitment through these growing pains. I only have 3 bars on my Nokia Gateway bust get as high as 700-800/60 speeds. My bill is constantly the same amount(unlike every month different with AT&T) and constant problems with Spectrum even though they had sufficient speeds. Never tried high dollar Version but I have service when others with Verizon sometimes don’t. I too am seeing some problems with internet that I didn’t see at first, but I fail to believe it is intentional by throttling but I could be mistaken. Anyway, life is full of frustrations, and we become more and more inpatient and feel like we deserve the very best with no interruptions. However, sometimes “we bite off our nose to spite our face” and have regrets later. So, if you’re new to T-Mobile, I am aware that you are unfamiliar with how they really stood out at a period in time, but hang in there, I don’t think you will regret it. If you are a longtime customer, maybe you can confirm what I think. By the way, I do not work for T-Mobile. I have no incentive to bragg on them. I just have been there through the ups and downs and am confident they have saved me a considerable amount of money. Remember, Apple used to be the most expensive phone by a long shot, but look at the prices now on others, ie:Samsung, Google, OnePlus, etc. So I’m staying with Apple also but not because I’m diehard Apple. They just happen to provide some very reliable equipment. Thanks for letting me sound off!
I see some comments here that are questionable. Now to be clear, I don’t think T-Mobile is perfect by no means, but the disillusioned people that consider high dollar Verizon the “only” way to go, and the unreliable AT&T farce, T-Mobile certainly stands out. I switched to T-Mobile way back when they were a nobody and began the no contract(un-carrier) craze that forced every carrier to follow. They were definitely the best value, they had you assigned to a fixed customer support location( I live in SC and mine was in Charleston) which was great, and always answered immediately with an English speaking rep. I have never before or since experienced such great support from any company hands down. Now, due to their growth and merger with Sprint, they can(understandably)no longer provide this personal support now, but it will take a lot to get me to move away from them. Now if you wish to pay more and go to a no better solution, all power to you. T-Mobile has the largest 5G network (although others lie about theirs being the largest and the best), the best deals and prices on their service, and my commitment through these growing pains. I only have 3 bars on my Nokia Gateway bust get as high as 700-800/60 speeds. My bill is constantly the same amount(unlike every month different with AT&T) and constant problems with Spectrum even though they had sufficient speeds. Never tried high dollar Version but I have service when others with Verizon sometimes don’t. I too am seeing some problems with internet that I didn’t see at first, but I fail to believe it is intentional by throttling but I could be mistaken. Anyway, life is full of frustrations, and we become more and more inpatient and feel like we deserve the very best with no interruptions. However, sometimes “we bite off our nose to spite our face” and have regrets later. So, if you’re new to T-Mobile, I am aware that you are unfamiliar with how they really stood out at a period in time, but hang in there, I don’t think you will regret it. If you are a longtime customer, maybe you can confirm what I think. By the way, I do not work for T-Mobile. I have no incentive to bragg on them. I just have been there through the ups and downs and am confident they have saved me a considerable amount of money. Remember, Apple used to be the most expensive phone by a long shot, but look at the prices now on others, ie:Samsung, Google, OnePlus, etc. So I’m staying with Apple also but not because I’m diehard Apple. They just happen to provide some very reliable equipment. Thanks for letting me sound off!
I feel the same way you do. I have been with T-Mobile for close to 20 years. If I ever had a problem, they helped. But this feels like something much worse. I feel like I was sold a service that they knew wasn’t what they were selling. One of the techs I talked to told me it was an experiment and just be patient and hang in there, I didn’t buy an experiment I believe everything you say they oversold and now they’re trying to play catch-up. To keep me they are going to have to offer me something I do not want to go back to cable and now I am so deep into T-Mobile with a new phone and all these bells and whistles that I bought and the Internet, I don’t know how to get out without spending a lot of money , they don’t throttle us, but if we have unlimited data plans, which on the home Internet, we all do, they do, you prioritize us during rush hour, whenever that is. So my 2MBPS drops even further to the point of not even being able to run a speed test . That’s going to far.
I have the same story. Worked great for the first several months. Last 5 weeks it has sucked. Dropping calls, streaming, just cuts out for 1-2 minutes every hour. Works great late at night or early morning, so it is probably over-crowded cell towers. Customer service checked everything out, didn’t find anything wrong, so they just said there is nothing they can do. I am shopping for new internet service.
Looks like Tmo deprioritizes home internet users. I found this article on the Internet
Speed claims
It wasn’t all rosy for T-Mobile. Charter argued that because T-Mobile Home Internet customers share the same network as mobile users but are prioritized last, consumers may experience much slower speeds than advertised during times of congestion.
I have had the same problem. Good reliability for the first month or so and then started dropping out for an hour or two at a time. A week or so ago it dropped out and did not return. We were gone for the last month or so with our motor home. I’d call tech support and all they could offer was to rest the gateway which obviously I couldn’t do when not home, We returned home a couple of days ago and I promptly called Cox to reinstate our internet service, I then called T-mobile to cancel my internet with them. They asked why and I explained that I needed reliable service for my thermostats, security cameras, etc when we are traveling. After I said that they said no problem and proceeded to process the cancellation and sent me a return label for the gateway. The fact that they made no effort to convince me to stay makes me believe that they know their service is unreliable and there is nothing they can do about it.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had the newer SAG FAST5688W gateway for about 2 months now and it is having the same drop issues, so I would doubt the issue is with the various gateways. The longest connection sustained so far has been a little over 2 days, and the worst has been multiple reboots per day. That said, when the service connects, I do usually get over 50Mb throughput (it’s using the N71 band). Being in rural Virginia, this is great for us.
To help make the constant rebooting less aggravating, I did see in another thread a device called Keep Connect - $50 on Amazon. Installed it yesterday and it has already automatically rebooted the device once, so now I don’t have to manually intervene. We’ll see - gateway has now been up 16h 38m 19s.
It’s unfortunate that T-Mobile can’t/won’t fix their software to do what the Keep Connect device does - automatically detect connection failure and restore it. Funny how you never have to reboot your phone.
If you’re listening T-Mobile, the device has dropped 21 times since I added the KeepConnect 6 days ago! At least the KeepConnect is handling the rebooting for me.
+8
It is hard to say for sure. Maybe it is related to congestion on the tower and traffic throttling or possibly it could be another source disrupting the traffic.
Do any of the cellular metrics fluctuate significantly during that period from when the traffic works?
Performance can be seriously impacted due to signal noise. Watch the RSRQ, signal quality and the SINR, signal noise. It might be some noise that results in significant impact on the signal. If you are in an urban area where there are more potential sources of RF noise I suppose possibly there could be a relationship to some factory or possibly a distribution center.
In addition to recording the cellular metrics you might experiment with the orientation of the gateway just a bit at a time. I discovered that by rotating the gateway clockwise or counter clockwise the exposure of the antennas in the gateway of course is different. There are multiple antennas in the Nokia that are in an alternating pattern with the cellular - wifi - cellular - wifi … orientation. As you rotate the gateway you can expose different antenna to the signal improving the signal wash over the antenna. I found by rotating my gateway pretty much 180 degrees from my initial placement to having the backside facing inside the room the signal receive power improved 2-3 dBm and signal quality also improved. It was a minor change but did result in a bit better performance.
On the back side left and right of the LAN ports there is the 5G-4 and 5G-1 antennas. Directly across from the back is WIFI-4 and to the left and right are 5G-3 and 5G-2. From my tinkering I found exposing the 5G-3 and 5G-2 antennas toward the window produced much better reception. I don’t know quite why that is but it did make a difference. If the exterior shell is removed the labels on the antenna are clearly visible. Those two antenna exposed more direct toward the tower make a difference for me.
Another possible thing to consider would be some transient signal on the power line. It might be rare but with power conditioning it can be prevented. I run all my electronic gear on UPS systems to protect them but that also conditions the power filtering out any noise that might be on the power lines. Think about it. If you can send Ethernet modulated over a power circuit there are possible transient signals that can also ride those power lines. You often will never know what others are doing around you so identifying a source of noise without expensive equipment is pretty difficult.
Then again with all that said it could have nothing to do with the gateway or local influence. It might just be congestion on the tower and excessive throttling. Doing things you can have some influence over to rule out local issues is a start but might not still resolve the behavior.
This morning, I have 4 bars.
Running Time 5d 3h 59m 45s
I hope this means my loss of Internet problem is finally fixed.
Agreed, rotating the gateway does make a difference. Arcadyan KVD21 has a display with buttons on one side. Initially I had the display opposite (away) from the window so it’s easy to read. Now, I have it turned almost 90 degrees to the right. I also put it on top of a box, on the table, to raise it up higher in the window, with blackout curtains to protect it from the sun. I always use an UPS.
I sure wish there were more details available, and more configuration options. The manual says I should be able to configure gateway settings from a browser on a real computer. All I can see is a status screen. It does not have anyplace to log in, so I am stuck squinting at the lame phone app. These tired old eyes need a full size monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I hate phones. That’s a children's toy.
+8
I cannot argue with that. I am so glad my Nokia still has the web GUI for management. The mobile application is a poor solution for gateway management.
This started happening to me back in July. I ultimately had to cancel my T-Mobile home Internet because it just wasn’t working for us. It was nearly flawless for the first seven or eight months of service. Easily over 300 Mbps for all of our (20+) devices. It was a dream replacement for our cable Internet that was just getting more and more expensive. However, no Internet just doesn’t work, so we replaced it with Verizon 4G LTE which is admittedly MUCH slower. Slower, but reliable and always present. That works for us. I am very sad that T-Mobile quit on us. It was great while it lasted. I think that our usage got us bumped off. We routinely used in excess of 1,600 Gb of data monthly. Interestingly, though, during this time our phone’s 5G failed to provide Internet for us. To get an Internet connection with our phones, we needed to downgrade to LTE. 5G would connect, but it wouldn’t provide ANY Internet access. That is clearly unacceptable for a home Internet solution.
This continuing modem dropping issue is very frustrating especially when we’re out traveling and our security system isn’t functioning. The only way to get it back up and operating is to unplug the modem, wait for a few minutes and then plug it back in. Should this continue, we’ll be closing our “T-Mobile” account as well. We can’t afford to have our security and monitoring systems compromised.
We are experiencing the same for 3 months worked perfectly and then keeps dropping the internet connection and it got worse with the new gateway. However my cell phone connection is very strong so I have been using a hotspot created with my phone. But I think that I am going to look for different provider.
Ours does the same thing, when I called about it, the lady said they were updating and that it would never happen again...needless to say it's still happening
My end result is the same - devices connected to the gateway but no internet. However, my issues do not occur throughout the day - only in the middle of the night when there is no activity. To me, it is almost as if the gateway (Arcadyan) is going into a sleep mode and losing the connection to the tower. After I reboot the gateway in the morning, it will be fine throughout the day.
I first reporting this issue several weeks ago and was told they were upgrading towers (Later discovered this is standard response when they don’t know the answer). When this continued, tech support seemed perplexed. I offered a temporary solution of adding a feature to the app where we can schedule a reboot at a specific day/time. They ignored me.
when I called back in last week, I was told they are aware of the issue and the engineers are working on this. Was told it was reported within the last few days - told them I had been reporting this same issue to them for 6 weeks. Now they want me to take notes on the error codes (there are no codes on the gateway or within the app). Guess I am now an unpaid member of their tech support.
This is getting frustrating and If this was happening throughout the day to me, I would be looking for a different provider.
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