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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Just as a note… I may me taking some assumptions here, but I am under the assumption that T-Mobile home internet is ‘deprioritized’ out of the box. I have 1 cell tower close to my house - LTE only, and 2 5G, towers ‘nearby’. TMobile home internet picks up both LTE and n41 5G, ‘but’ service is much less usable than my cell. Latency is high, and speeds fluctuate from 10-50Mbps, with often timeouts. Late night it goes over 300Mbps.
On my S21, its typically well over 100Mbps, up to ~220Mbps late at night, but never picks up n41 and rarely n71. Latency is decent and stable.
Wasn’t a miracle. By 8:50 it’s back down to 5 Mb/s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If you get the PCI value you can search for it on CellMapper.net and locate the tower that serves that signal out. With a 4G LTE / 5G NR capable phone it should be possible to obtain the cellular metrics for both signals. The bars on the LED screen are rather generic and do not provide enough information. It does not sound like you are receiving a 5G signal with those speeds or it is a very poor signal reception.
You state you are using CellMapper on your phone so are you looking at 4G or 5G signaling or both?
With CellMapper.net in a browser you can provide your area code to get the general location and then display 4G LTE, 5G NR, or both. I find filtering for one or the other helpful. You will see more 4G LTE towers and IF the 5G cell you receive is on the map that really helps but CellMapper is not 100% as it does rely upon users using the Android application and uploading the findings to the server to have the data installed into the database. This does require an account but it does not cost anything to set up. CellMapper seems to be one of the best resources for locating the cells still. Below is a chart that will help you determine more about your cellular signals. Use the T-Mobile home internet mobile application on your phone to see the cellular metrics. Determine if you really are receiving a functional 5G signal.
I’m very new to cellmapper, and can’t run it on any of the actual computers because it insists I’m using an ad blocker. Even when I turn off ALL the extensions in Firefox or Chrome it still complains. So, it’s not very useful on the computer.
It SHOWS three towers nearby, but nothing about which one would be used here, or anything else.
Thus, I ran it on the cell phone.
BTW: At the moment, the desktop is getting somewhere between .5 Mb/s (yes, 500k) and 2.1 Mb/s. The cell phone has dropped out of 5G and it got 3.9 Mb/s a minute ago.
As far as 4G or 5G or whatever, I don’t know what it’s showing. In the home internet app, I can see devices connected (or could, before things turned to *&^%$ a little while ago), and the netword STILL says the connection is “Excellent”. I have no idea what PCI is, or how to relate any metrics - are you talking about the stuff in the “more” tab? If so, which ones?
At the moment, there’s not even enough bandwidth available to SEND this entry. I had to switch back to the old DSL to get enough network.
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The request could not be satisfied.
Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.
After which nothing T-Mobile was reachable from any of my networks for a couple hours.
I’m not sure what the home Internet does as far as priority, but it MOSTLY runs about the same speeds as either of the S22s. But, this evening, the Home Internet totally tanked. There was a period where you couldn’t even connect to it. At the moment, my S22 is getting about 34 Mb/s. The HI is getting just over 3 Mb/s… So there must be something going on, I just don’t know enough to know what it is.
BUT, we hadn’t originally planned to get the Home Internet, so if I can’t get some kind of resolution from the “home internet” support people tomorrow it’ll go back and we’ll stay with the 15-year-old DSL that only gets 20 Mb/s, but reliably does about 15, which is adequate for what we use it for…
I suggest you contact T-Mobile support and have them provide you with more information about the actual cell coverage in the area. They may be deploying 5G coverage but it sounds like it is not close enough to be very functional. That tower you can see might not be hosting T-Mobile cells. I know the tower that serves the cells we connect to is 5.3 miles due north and we have clear line of sight. I don’t mean to be the grinch but you might be in a cellular dead zone or at the edge of a cell reach. The tower you do see downtown might be hosting T-Mobile cells but your location might still be on the edge of the Fresnal zone. The cell emits the waves in a shape somewhat like a blimp or football shape referred to as the Fresnal zone. If there is insufficient downward tilt of the cell the sweet spot of the emissions are possibly well above your gateway. Often they deploy multiple cells in a location and the signals are set to try to cover the area close and farther out. T-Mobile has the information from your SIM card that should provide them with information to determine more about the connection. Maybe they are in the process of turning up the 5G delivery in the area and have not completed their work. Contacting support and pushing for answers is probably your best course of action.
Itinkeralot...a question for you. I’m north of Durham and my cell tower is almost exactly as you described (5.5 miles, but I have line-of-sight as well). My download averages 60 mbps, with a low of 15 and a high of 130 observed. Uploads only a little slower than downloads typically. Router shows 4-bars, but some of the cell metrics not so hot. What are you seeing with yours? (sorry for the cell hijack!)
I share your frustration with cellmapper in Chrome. There is no iOS app, and the web-based app also tells me to shut off ad blocker when it is already disabled. Not a well written utility.
I used it in an alternate browser and discovered where my cell tower is located, and t turns out it's an LTE tower with some 5G capability. That explains why I'm only connecting at 4G speeds, although more than sufficient for my needs. (Not a gamer.)
I’ve got an 800 number to get me to the “home internet” team, so I’ll try that when I get home in a couple hours.
Last night, from around 7 pm til sometime after 9 pm, the home internet was non-functional. Computers and cell phones couldn’t even connect to it. The couple times I DID get the computer to connect download speeds were in the .5 Mb/s (not 5, .5)…
We COULD, in theory, be in some kind of dead zone, but I’m getting different answers from different tools. Cellmapper insists I’m using the tower across the river (East), which is at MOST ¼ mile away. And we’re slightly uphill from downtown, so it should be seeing us perfectly. Network Call Info Lite (NCIL) says we’re using a tower straight South that’s about 5 or 6 blocks - maximum ½ mile. OR, about 7:30 it started saying we’re using a tower that’s less than 2 blocks - literally down the street. We have clear line of sight to all of them.
This morning, using the speed test in NCIL, from the cell phone I got about 16 Mb/s. Using the wifi into the home Internet I got about 9. And in the last 20 minutes that’s dropped to about FIVE Mb/s.
On the other hand, if I switch OFF 5G on the cell phone and do a speed test, I consistently get between 35 and 50 Mb/s, but I have no idea if the Home Internet is smart enough to switch OUT of 5G or if it even can.
At THIS moment (08:15), I had to reconnect to the home internet. Apparently the connection dropped and one of the other data lines took over. BUT, when I reconnected and ran speed test on the computer, I got 60 Mb/s download. If it would do that all the time, I’d be happy. AND from the cell into the home internet I got 48-60 Mb/s. And the cell by itself just showed 250 Mb/s.
Since I’ve been messing with all this for 2 hours, I can absolutely say I was NOT seeing anything like this before just after 8 a.m. I WAS seeing the numbers above - maybe 16 on the phone, about 9 dropping to around 5 on the Home Internet.
What the heck is going on? Just went out and did the same thing with my wife’s computer and cell phone. She’s getting around 60 Mb/s from the home Internet and 270 from her cell…
And is it going to go back to garbage at 8:30 or 9 a.m. when people start doing whatever?
The behavior you are seeing could very well be due to T-Mobile engineers working on the 5G cells. When they are doing so I have seen the disruptions go on for 3-5 days and then once it is set it usually is improved.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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...
