I read a bunch of the horror stories in here, but decided to try T-Mobile’s home internet anyhow ‘cause I ALSO read some of the “I get 200+ Mb/s and it NEVER drops below 100” topics. I’m in a town of 20,000 a ways south of Minneapolis.
I have 2 Galaxy S22 phones and at the moment they’re getting about 14-16 Mb/s, which is ALSO what the home internet is getting. BUT, minute to minute, speeds on all the devices fluctuates wildly. It can be 4 Mb/s 1 minute and 15 the next, then back to 2.
I don’t know how accurate or consistent speedtest.net is, so is there a better tool for getting good data on speed?
I did the setup with the phone app. And when I told it to find the tower it pointed North. There aren’t any towers I know of that are north, but the app said there was. Since it was next to me, I pointed it North, just in case. Got about 14-16 Mb/s. Turned it East, toward downtown, which is straight through the window in the office and got about 14-16 Mb/s. Turned it south and got about the same. Didn’t seem to matter. NO direction EVER produced anything like the number I’m seeing from others in here who aren’t happy with 50 or 60 Mb/s.
I put cellmapper on the phone and it pointed directly at the tower downtown - about 300 yards away. So, I put the box in the window pointing down town and got about 12-14 Mb/s.
Moved it to the center of the house so it was between wife and me, and it got about 10-20 Mb/s most of the time. About the same as sitting in the office window on on the desk next to me.
A little while ago I moved it so it’s 10 feet from the wife, pointing out a window directly at the tower and it got about 7 - 10 Mb/s, maxed out around 14 Mb/s.
Both phones and the home Internet all say they’ve got 5G, but unless I’m doing something wrong, this has to be about the slowest 5G around…
Is there anything I should be doing differently? Does pointing the thing toward where I THINK a tower is make any difference? Am I three blocks from the downtown tower and just in some kind of 5G wasteland and out of luck?
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I live in Summerdale, Alabama and get speeds at around 30-85 / 20-40 facing west, appearing to hit the tower off of 59 in Summerdale with 3 bars. Last week moved the gateway facing south and for a solid week was getting speeds of well over 200 (up to 675 at one time) and 3 bars.
Yesterday service was so crappy, was getting less than 1 meg with only 2 bars facing south/ 3 bars facing west, but still bad service. Looks like for a week I was potentially hitting a tower in the south with great speeds, but now gateway is connecting back to the tower to the west with decent to crappy (at times) speeds.
Is there a new tower going up south of me that for a week was in a maintenance mode providing those out of the world speeds?
It’s now been 28 days with the Arcadyan box. No crashes. A few slow spots every day, but NOTHING as wretched as the Sagemcom box. For the most part, software downloads - usually between 200 MB and 1.5 GB, have been fast AND have not disrupted other network-hungry concurrent operations.
SO FAR, it’s been good enough that we terminated the service with the 17-year-old DSL.
Next comes a bigger challenge. I’ll be in Florida, going down the Gulf side, across the Big Cypress and Everglades and up the Atlantic side. I”ll have the Samsung S22 on t-Mobile, the Visible data phone on Verizon, and my Nighthawk M1 on AT&T. I’ll be able to SEE where I have service, where I don’t, and how good it is.
I have three towers that are close - the closest is about 2 blocks and line of sight. Another is downtown, max ¼ mile and again line of sight. The third is a little farther away but probably an extra 2 blocks. I’m not sure which one provides the very high speeds I would see periodically with the 2 Sagemcom boxes. Support SAYS it’s the one that’s 2 blocks away.
I don’t know what tower the Arcadyan is using - it never hits the speeds the other boxes did, but it also doesn’t fall on it’s face a dozen times a day and go below 1 Mbps.
Like yours mine is “almost always +30 Mbps”, though it’ll get down to 20 for the lows. I can live with that. I’d prefer NOT to see numbers down below 10 Mbps, though SO FAR we haven’t had an abnormal amount of buffering when streaming, and large-ish downloads on my computer have been reasonable.
What I’ve noticed today is that the average speed over the last 22 hours (midnight last night to 10 pm) has trended DOWN from a starting average of about 160 Mbps to less than 60 Mbps by 10 pm.
T-Mobile has said a couple times that these gateways need to be power-cycled weekly or at least every other week. It may become a Saturday morning thing to pull the plug for a minute.
BUT, the box has now made it through THREE days with no dreadful numbers and no crashes. If it makes it into tomorrow, we’ll keep it and shut down the ancient DSL.
T-Mobile service for me is kind of similar (but not exactly the same).
S21 - has been consistent at my address, typically on LTE only and at times picking up n71 (which is actually worse, being ~1 mile away vs. 1200’.)
The modem doesn’t have options, so I have to pick a spot where I can pull LTE from the 1200’ tower and block n71 from the 5G tower until the local is rebuilt.
Speeds are ‘meh’ during the day on the device, and a ‘bit’ worse during the evenings - but almost always +30Mbps, and at times up to 150Mbps.
Middle of the night it will hit +250Mbps (picking up a different n71 / n41 from 1 mile in other direction).
Things should get better in the spring when T-Mobile rebuilds the legacy LTE tower (B2/B66/B12) to LTE + 5G.
After a lot of continued problems, wasted conversations with support, and getting contradictory information from most everybody I’ve talked too, we were ready to dump the thing and stay with the SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD DSL. Last several conversations went pretty much the same
“The box isn’t communicating with the tower.”
“Except at THIS MOMENT the box is working fine. I have Internet and it’s between 300 and 400 Mbps.”
“But the box isn’t communicating with the tower.”
“So how WOULD I know this?”
“OH, you’d have REALLY POOR PERFORMANCE!” (This while the thing has been running between 300 and 400 Mbps for the last hour after the last time it crashed and rebooted)
The support person was DETERMINED that the second box was “bad” and wanted it replaced. SO, back to T-Mobile for ANOTHER Home Internet box...
This time the local T-Mobile replaced the Sagemcom box with an Arcadian (not sure of the spelling). It appears to work about the same, but SO FAR, we're not getting the extremely fast 400Mbps speeds OR the extremely SLOW .25 Mbps speeds. AND, it's on day THREE and it hasn't crashed yet.
Yesterday is pretty typical. Only have buffering a couple times and download speeds, at their slowest, are generally at about as good as the ancient DSL.
I'm hopeful this thing will continue working. If it stays up through tomorrow, we'll keep it. I still don't understand the astronomical variability from minute to minute, especially in the middle of the night when there should be very few people doing anything heavy, but as long as it stays high enough to keep things usable I'll just ignore it.
A mechanical question - is this thing prone to overheating? I had a box with a 12V fan in it blowing up through the bottom of the Sagemcom box 'cause I read in here that keeping it cool would keep it running (turned out to be untrue), but if this thing NEEDS the extra cooling I can use the fan, though it annoys the domestic associate who has ears like a bat and hates fan noise of any kind...
Interesting…….. Things had not changed… Here’s what the graph looked like a couple days ago.
A normal day here - higher and wildly fluctuating at 5 a.m., slowly degrading. Then, about 2 p.m., it falls on it’s face and only gets above 10 Mbps 4 or 5 times for the next EIGHT hours. It GRADUALLY improves after 10 pm.
Tuesday, had another conversation with t-Mobile support Tuesday morning, where THIS person essentially contradicted everything thing the person from LAST week said, except for stating clearly and repeatedly that this was NOT the performance to be expected. And that MINIMUM download speed should not be below 37 Mbps and max out around 130 Mbps. Which numbers would make me happy.
OK...
But, he created another ticket, and THIS time he stated repeatedly that HE would call me back Thursday to see how things had improved…
Continued monitoring yesterday. This morning, after the normal overnight series of points around 60 with a few falling on their face, THIS happened…
Between the 6:26 and 6:36 points (I suspect at 6:30), a jump to numbers in the mid 400 Mbps range. Which seemed odd given the mediocre performance to date, but I DIDN’T look the gift horse in the mouth. Unfortunately, it only lasted ‘til about 8 a.m. when it fell back on it’s face to 7 Mbps. I confirmed the high speed with speedtest on the computer AND on a cell phone.
Somebody remove the throttling and/or deprioritization for 90 minutes? Any idea what’s going on?
I’ve continued monitoring the Home Internet speeds. I presume everybody must be on their way to grandma’s house ‘cause last night between 7 and 10 it DIDN’T suck as badly as usual. It only got down to below 1 Mbps 3 or 4 times in the 3 hours, and mostly seemed to be between 4 and 7 Mbps with the monitor taking a reading every 10 minutes… FAR from stellar, and far from what I was told by support that I’d be getting on Thursday, but I’ll see what happens Monday or Tuesday.
If I can’t put the Verizon/Visible SIM in the spare Moto G7 Power, and performance continues to be bad, and support doesn’t come up with anything, the box will have to go back to T-Mobile by the end of next week.
I was told by the support person that they’d credit the month of service AND guarantee me I could return the device beyond the 15 days, but they never sent me anything confirming that, so I’m guessing it was “inaccurate”...
A different view
This is yesterday from 5 a.m. to midnight. Starts ok higher, goes down, goes up at lunch, back down when kids get home from school, back up during dinner, and tanks when steaming/gaming/whatever in the evening happen. EVERYBODY in town on this tower CAN’T be seeing the same lousy service or it would have been fixed, I presume…
Today will be with the box in the South-facing, UPSTAIRS window - that’s where the T-Mobile app SAYS the tower it’s using is… BTW: this morning at 6 a.m. it’s only at 20 Mbps...
I suspect you’ll have much better luck than I’m having. And yeah, we switched to Youtube TV a while back to get rid of Directv. It’s mostly OK.
BUT, From 6 this morning (you’ve already seen the data) the Home Internet dropped off from the 50s down into the 30s, but stayed in that range ‘til about 3:45 this afternoon. Took a sharp drop down to around 10 Mbps, then about 5:45 back into the 20s til around 7:30 when it fell on it’s face. Between 2 Mbps and .3 until around 9:45 when it climbed back to around 6.
I have this strange feeling it matches “3:45: kids come home from school and do whatever”, then “5:30 or so, family or someone stops to eat dinner” then “7:00, everybody streams, plays games, whatever” then 9:30 or so “kids go to bed” and the load goes down some…
BUT, it DIDN’T drop any connections and it didn’t crash - SO FAR.
Tonight I’ll move it upstairs again and put it in the window that faces the tower the cell phone app TOLD me it’s using.
We’ll try that tomorrow, starting when I get on.
If THAT doesn’t make a significant improvement, it’s time to call T-Mobile and see if they want to do something. So depending on tomorrow, probably Friday if necessary.
Not encouraging words considering we just switched over from Xfinity to T-mobile yesterday. I can’t deal with the inconsistent stuff you people are saying plus switch to You Tube to completely ditch cable.
The local store just opened a week ago, so they’re not swamped yet. But, they also don’t have any of the “old” equipment. The only Home Internet thing they have is the one I’ve got - the 5688W.
SO FAR today, the speed hasn’t gotten “BAD”… Other than the two very low outliers, speeds have stayed above 20 Mbps. NOT great by any stretch, but about as good as the 17-year-old DSL.
We’ll see what it does this evening when things normally compost.
I would guess you could try it and it would either work or not but should not hurt anything. Those Netgear Nighthawk M1 LTE routers had a pretty decent reputation. I would not be surprised if it didn’t work unless they only allow their gateways and do a check. Is the SIM the same size. I think that is a nano SIM as I recall? If the numbers are back to the flakey that is not a good sign. I seem to recall those at one point were also capable of coverage for the T-Mobile bands. That is one consideration of any modem is if it supports the frequency bands for the carrier.
It might be surprising if the store actually has the 4G LTE gateway on hand. Try to get an appointment before you go in. Save yourself time. You never know when a wave hits.
I’ve got to stop at the local T-Mobile anyhow, so I’ll ask if they have any of the 4G units… I’m also planning to give T-Mobile a call and see how cooperative they want to be… Would they like some money for home Internet or none? And a customer that says good things about them or not? I’d have been more confident a few years ago, but VERY few companies seem to care at ALL about their reputations these days. I guess they all figure there’s a dozen customers to replace every one that leaves.
A THIRD option my wife asked about… In THEORY, my Netgear Nighthawk M1 is unlocked (long story, predecessor of Visible that went belly up). If so, I could pull the SIM out of the other box and put it in there. That’s a 4G device, and it has always worked really well on AT&T. I ALSO have a MIMO antenna for it, so potentially it could work fine.
Unfortunately, I’m FAR from being an expert at any of this so I don’t know if I could even get the Nighthawk working with T-Mobile.
SO FAR, today, speeds are MOSTLY holding at around 40 Mbps on the 5688, but I’m starting to see numbers like 1.8 and .22 Mbps show up in some results.
You have the replacement Sagemcon but the signal degradation in the middle of the night is still pretty abysmal. It is hard to say. I have seen users go from one Sagemcon to another then another and then another looking for one that does not have the power/rebooting issue. I am not sure what that is all about as we will never know. I did have a conversation in the community with another user that had the 5G gateway and it was having much the same behavior with respect to signal being unpredictable. He had the conversation with T-Mobile about the 4G vs the 5G and they provided the 4G gateway I sent you the information on. His 4G was better and more consistent than the 5G and he was offered the option to return to the 5G gateway after the upgrades were completed.
That is still not to say there could still not be some disruptions with the 4G LTE as I know they have been converging the 4G and 5G over the same infrastructure. There was a recent article that suggested they have done that. Previously the two “solutions” were not on the converged cloud architecture. From what I can see my iPhone 12 Pro only obtains an IPv6 address. The home gateways obtain both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. T-Mobile does use the 464XLAT as their network is IPv6. I would guess the 4G LTE gateway would run both IPv4 and IPv6 with the 464XLAT commonly referred to as carrier grade NAT but it is actually translation of IPv4 to/over IPv6 and then back to IPv4. There does also seem to be some delivery via IPv6 and phones use the IPv6 for data delivery. If the services run native IPv6 it is actually a simpler way to get the job done. I know it looks more imposing but actually it is not.
Still I would say discuss the 4G LTE and ask to talk to a customer retention specialists. I once got to one via the chat once I got past the chatbot. The initial chat agent was not but I was passed up the food chain. If they are concerned about customer retention they will talk with you. I think it would be a good concession. If they would allow you to sit on the 5G unit and send the 4G LTE gateway and have you just swap the SIM or send the 4G LTE with a SIM installed it would be a good way to examine the service delivery a little better. The one thing that still is concerning is that even if the 5G signal source was down the 4G LTE should do better than what was recorded. The 4G LTE has been around a long time and is mature. The behavior might still be due to the “converged” 4G/5G infrastructure. I found the article with a quick search. Is it working all over as intended? hum...
I’ve tried to find anything online about deactivating 5G in the FAST 5688W, but haven’t found anything.
Another open, though one I wouldn’t try since it would void the warranty, would be to open the unit and disconnect the 5G antenna - I presume that would get it to use LTE, but don’t know for sure.
pphw, as far as the speed drop, I don’t know. I didn’t get the box ‘til Saturday night, so I don’t know what it was like before Sunday, which was dreadful, but MAY have been partially caused by the box rebooting frequently…
Here’s the chart and the numbers for the last 14 hours:
Starting shortly after 7 pm last evening when I started the monitor, it fell into the toilet (take a look at the numbers below), and didn’t even get to the dismal point til around 11:30 pm. Then it stayed lousy ALL NIGHT… What would be causing it to be so wretched overnight when there CAN’T be that many people playing Fortnite or streaming porn? Then SUDDENLY between 5:30 and 6 a.m. it jumps to better… And starts sliding back down, but at 9 a.m. it’s still at 50, which is at least usable… The monitor is still running so I should have something for at least 24 hours. Any thoughts?
They do have the 4G - TM-RTL0102 LTE WiFi Gateway
The one advantage it has over the Arcadyan or Sagemcon is that it does have a web GUI driven management interface. The RTL0102 does share that characteristic that the Nokia 5G gateway has.
If the 5G is not working you might get them to provide one of the 4G LTE Gateways just to see the difference. It actually might work out in the location where you are until they get the 5G proper. Talking to a customer retention specialists is probably the way to move on that if you do.
I don’t think here would qualify as urban - town is about 20,000 people.
Is the “Sagemcon gateway” the black box that says “FAST 5688W” that’s on the shelf next to me? If so, what’s the alternative for home Internet on T-Mobile that WILL work?
I have to admit, so far T-Mobile seriously hasn’t covered themselves in glory. The Home Internet is slow, the cell phones aren’t bad, though on 5G they’re USUALLY not much, if any, faster than the HI. Though, when they switch to LTE or I switch them out of 5G they’re between 5X and 10X faster than the 5G.
Unfortunately, according to the T-Mobile store, I CANNOT do the same thing with the Gateway - change it so it DOESN’T use 5G and uses LTE instead.
Anyhow the monitor is running, so I’ll see what it looks like in the morning - I suspect it runs adequately around 2 a.m.
Speed dropped in half compared to last week. My guess is lots of new sign-ups.
Some of the Sagemcon gateways have experienced power related issues where they start doing a reboot rather frequently. Some users have gone through multiple gateways trying to find one that does not have the problem. That would be very frustrating and a huge waste of time. I am just not impressed with the more recent gateways. Only having the mobile application to manage the gateway is a huge negative for me.
With the speed only peaking out around 100 Mbs and then being up/down and continuing to fall on average over time it seems like there is possibly an over subscription for the cell. If you are in an urban area and there are lots of subscribers hitting the same cells it is probably due to bandwidth throttling. The cell phones on the same cells do get priority over the fixed broadband 5G gateways so the fact that the phones get more bandwidth seems to fit the profile for throttling. If they would avoid over loading the cells and provisioning better it would be great but for some reason it does not appear they will take a more protective approach to bandwidth distribution.
The fun continues…
Last evening, with the box in the East facing window upstairs, we both lost connection repeatedly. But, by the time I could get upstairs, it was always up, so I didn’t know if it was crashing or just having some kind of fit.
Today, I brought it down and put it in the middle of the house. Doesn’t seem to make a BIT of difference WHERE it is as far as speed.
Worked fine this morning. This afternoon, at 3:30, we both lost our connection. And again at 4:35, then at 5:27. At 4:35 and 5:27 I got to the box quickly enough to SEE it saying “Powering Up”. Called the T-Mobile store and they had me come over to swap the box.
I started running a monitor this morning, and having it check the downloads every 15 minutes for several hours. Here’s the chart/graph:
It ran from about 6 a.m. to about 1:45 this afternoon. Load was extremely light - NO TVs, very little activity from either computer (mine was the ONLY one on the Home Internet. Wife went back to the DSL.
Started at 100 Mbps, Fell drastically by 10 a.m., continued down from there.
I’m going to try to get it to monitor at least 24 hours to see what it shows. And note the time either of us gets disconnected.
I can’t say they’re NOT doing maintenance. But at 7 to after 9 pm on Sunday night?
I got through to T-Mobile and one of the people had me do a couple things I’d already done a bunch of times. Then she told me “they’re doing maintenance on a tower in that area”. I suspect they’re ALWAYS doing maintenance on some tower in that area, but my experience with Visible (Verizon) has left me a bit cynical.
Stopped at the T-Mobile store, where they checked and told me the maintenance was ONLY ON 3G and should have NO effect on 5G. So who’s right?
In the end, the ONLY thing T-Mobile came up with was “when the home internet slows down or stops, reboot it”.
Which sounds a LOT like Visible support, only faster ‘cause it’s on the phone instead of “chat”.
The store used a different program to access the home internet box, made some changes and did something with the sim, and confirmed which tower the unit would be using. With that, since I know the tower is to the East, I tried all over the upstairs, including sitting in the farthest East-facing window, so you can look over at the tower about ¼ mile away. No difference no matter where I put it. Gets maybe 30 or Mb/s and that’s about it.
Cell phones were consistently 200+ Mb/s this morning. Now they’re at about 30 also.
We’ll see if things improve. Fortunately, we’ve got 15 days to take the Home Internet back and we’re on day 3.
Sherski311, I feel your pain. I THINK we can stream TV. We were yesterday until there was ZERO bandwidth available about 7 pm. T-Mobile support ASSURED me that was “from the ongoing maintenance”.
Speeds here bounce all over the place too, but I’ve got you beat on the low end… We’ve been below ONE Mb/s.
As for my service being “weak”. What constitutes weak on the cell phone? Using Network Cell Info Lite on the phone, I have RSRP dBm of -86 – well into the green. RSRQ, dB is -9. RSSNR, db is 15. The map says I’m talking to a tower about a half mile to my south. Speed earlier this morning was over 200 Mb/s. Right now it’s 17 Mb/s with a max of about 30.
With the cell phone connected to the home internet, Network Cell Info gives me , on the top gauge display, RSRP dBm of -83 on the “serving Cell”, which is “5G(NSA) T-Mobile”, -10 RSRQ, dB, RSSNR 15. The bottom display appears to be the Home Internet network and RSRP is -96 to -102, so at the edge of yellow, -20 RSRQ db, and 44 to 52 for ASU. Unfortunately, other than the RSRP dBm, with has red, yellow and green, I don’t know if the other numbers are good or bad.
At the moment the Home Internet is sitting IN the window, aimed straight at the tower it’s supposedly using. I was told at the T-Mobile store that you actually want the right rear corner pointed at the tower as you’re facing the unit (the screen being the front). I’ve tried it with the front facing the tower and the right rear. Made no difference.
At the moment, performance is mediocre at best, but it’s as good as the DSL, which is more expensive, so it’s PROBABLY good enough to keep if it doesn’t get any worse, or quit completely again. But, at the moment, having had sort-of Verizon when on Visible, T-Mobile is about as good as they were. The only difference I can see so far is you get a person on the phone to tell you why you’re getting poor service instead of having to “chat”…
As far as cellmapper, I can’t run it on ANY of my Windows browsers. It persists in telling me I’ve got an ad blocker running no matter what I do. So it’s on the cell phone.
Cell Mapper uses ads to fund the service or there is a subscription for $3 CAD/month. If you “Agree” to the terms for the cookies it will allow you to use it but you have to put up with the ads. Once you figure it out it is not any worse than any other. I am on a MacBook Pro and I have cellmapper.net up on Chrome and on Safari. I find i works better on Safari as Chrome tends to not work with the location well. I have not bothered to work that out on Chrome as Safari works fine. When I launch Chrome it always puts me out in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa. I must be at the beach in the Canary Islands or something. So, anyway it is in part the blocking by Chrome and Firefox. With Safari I have no major issue using the site even without a subscription.
If service is really weak like that it could be your location is just not optimal for signal reception or they are still doing upgrades and deployments in the area and coverage is still spotty. It would be worth the call to get more information about coverage in the area. If you have to drop the T-Mobile service for now you are still in the trial period so you should get your money back upon returning the gateway.
New home internet and T-Mobile customer here in general. We’ve tried it out for over a week now and we can’t stream TV on this. The screen freezes constantly. I unfortunately don’t think the internet will work out for us, luckily I didn’t cancel my other internet provider yet. Frustrating, since I am now paying for 2 services. I was hoping to get around to calling the internet customer service line and have them try to troubleshoot, as I’ve done many speedtests and they are all over the place. The most I’ve gotten was 30+, lowest around 2. That is not good!
The up/down behavior does seem to fit the profile for when they are working on the equipment. If the cellular equipment that was in that location was Sprint they could be replacing the older gear with newer gear and the disruptions as such are quite common actually. Unfortunately that seems to be how things happen with the rapid expansion of the 5G rollout. In some locations the expansion with existing towers has been completed and in other they continue to push out more coverage. We are in a rural area in east TN with a pasture behind the house and rolling hills as we are in the ridge and valley zone just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Even the cows could have connectivity here.
They really might be still tuning things up. It is worth a call. If you get with a level 1 engineer that just needs to meet the 5 minute call target you might not get the answers you need but if you get with a good level 2 engineer you might actually get some reasonable answers. I had to push for answers with a customer retention expert once and well, that has some advantages. You have to work the system. If Verizion or another carrier in the area is hungry for subscribers letting them know you are considering other options is a reasonable approach. Sometimes we just have to push to get answers and not be put off.
