Question

Has ping / tracert been blocked on 5g network?

  • 18 October 2022
  • 79 replies
  • 3925 views
S
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Before yesterday (10/17/2022), I’ve always had a command prompt window (MS Windows) up running a constant ping at 3 second interval - so I can tell when the network starts to degrade or just stops responding (which has become very frequent in the last few months).

As of yesterday morning, both ping and tracert commands consistently fail.  As in no longer any response.  So it appears the ports used for those commands are now being blocked on the 5g network?  

I have a 5g phone on Tmobile, and I see the same result.  On 5g with hotspot turned on, with computer connected, ping and tracert fail 100%.  If I force the phone to use LTE and stay off 5g, ping and tracert start working again.  Don’t really understand why Tmobile would block such a basic network analysis command.

This is in downtown Scottsdale AZ.  As a sidenote, service on the 5g network degrades consistently  every day after about 8am, and usually is consistently bad all weekend long.  Works great before 8am most days.

79 replies

S

I tried calling T-Mobile support but no one understands the issue or even knows what ping is. 

Not to mention as a network admin I use apps on my iPhone all the time to ping our external services when I am not near my laptop. 

A

I haven't seen many issues out if it yet but it's very annoying.  I use Teams for work and it's working fine.

 

As a Network Admin though, this makes some of my troubleshooting I do day to day very difficult.

S

Here in the S.F. Bay Area I had a similar ping problem for about a week -- about 70-80% lost packets.  Starting two days ago, I’ve had no problems.  Tried half a dozen sites, all respond with 0% loss.  Hopefully the issue gets resolved where you’re at...

Glade to hear your issue was fixed. Was worried they changed something. Knowing it is a technical issue that will be resolved is better. 

iTinkeralot
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For some reason it appears T-Mobile is blocking ICMP traffic. Both the ping utility and trace routing use ICMP so it pretty much breaks both. Here in east TN now nothing when pinging. Ten packets sent zero responses. The other day the latency was 180 ms plus and 80% loss. Now nada

S

For some reason it appears T-Mobile is blocking ICMP traffic. Both the ping utility and trace routing use ICMP so it pretty much breaks both. Here in east TN now nothing when pinging. Ten packets sent zero responses. The other day the latency was 180 ms plus and 80% loss. Now nada

Yeah, 100% loss for me for any webpage. In the Phoenix AZ area. 

iTinkeralot
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Not a surprise. The first response I made on the topic was to another subscriber in Arizona. I had one subscriber in LA that stated they were able to issue pings with 100% success. Now, that may have changed but I don’t know.

S

Ok, i spoke to T-Mobile tech and they said they no longer support ping so that is interesting. 

J
Userlevel 1

Ok, i spoke to T-Mobile tech and they said they no longer support ping so that is interesting. 

FFS.

 

Since we'e picking & choosing cucial communication potocols now, I've decided to no longe suppot the lette 'r'.

iTinkeralot
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Doh! Missed one  rrrrrr mate!

Since we'e icking & choosing cucial communication potocols now, I've decided to no longe suppot the lette 'r'.

S

Doh! Missed one  rrrrrr mate!

Since we'e icking & choosing cucial communication potocols now, I've decided to no longe suppot the lette 'r'.

LOL, right. Yeah, I really hope the tire 2 tech didn’t know what he was talking about. You would think T-Mobile business support would have more information or use a more seasoned rep but they had no more information than regular consumer support. He said he sent the ticket to engineering and it would be a few days. 

iTinkeralot
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I was thinking about that last night after I went to bed. I think I had a Biden moment on that “P”. How I did that I don’t know. I guess just NOT paying attention. My BAD. I don’t feel so bad as you missed my reference. :-) You were spot on. I think I was up too late staring at the monitor.

iTinkeralot
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I really don’t get why they feel the need to block or choke ICMP traffic. Some over aggressive control freak decided to be all Rambo on users it seems. The more bad choices T-Mobile makes the more they will keep pushing customers away. If they really want to kick ATT and Verizon about they need to do it better not just put a thin veneer on it. You can put lipstick and a dress on a pig but it is still a pig. 

iTinkeralot
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I am not sure they are interested in the ICMP operation for end users. It behaves as if it has been throttled. I know routers put ICMP on the low end for priority when handling it but it has been and will continue to be a helpful troubleshooting tool. I know analysis of trace routing information can be a challenge but it at least provides some clarity for a novice as to the routing path and time references. 

When it comes to cellular connections there are enough obstacles without adding to the basic ones.

R
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Shannon steward Hi I am Emma that girl that girl is cute from far but I got it from class🤷 hey Siri truth I actually remember her from the party 18 years old drunk it's only time I ever said that 

J
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Shannon steward Hi I am Emma that girl that girl is cute from far but I got it from class🤷 hey Siri truth I actually remember her from the party 18 years old drunk it's only time I ever said that 

Begone, thot spammer. 

M

I’m in the Bay Area, CA. I am not experiencing this with mobile service and we don’t have T-Mobile for home internet. This discussion makes me glad that we don’t. Honestly I don’t know what T-Mobile is thinking with this decision. 

S

Yeah I am not sure what areas are seeing this issue. Sounds like the Bay Area is not seeing the issue anymore. I just tested from the Phoenix area and still seeing the issue. 

S

T-Mobile called be back today, they are not grasping the issue. Still having issues with ping but clearly they have no clue what that is. They obviously have no concept of tech troubleshooting and when they read back my issue they get it wrong 100% of the time no matter how many times I explained it to them. They must only have a grasp of English as it relates to the script they have. It is so frustrating. Like I say “ This is my issue” they so “I understand, what happens if you try a different website”. After literally an hour on the phone with this person I just gave up. My only option is to have our employees change ISP.

I should have recorded these calls for YouTube because it is almost comically frustrating.

 

W

in Phoenix area too. These changes may be the cause of our unpleasant experience recently.
 

1) We have a Ting Fire device that monitor’s the electrical wiring of our home and it sends information out. It went offline. Couldn’t get it to work, but took the device to a neighbors house and no issues…

2) Had challenges joining a homeowner’s association meeting. The HOA property management firm uses Microsoft Teams. I was able to get on after a couple attempts. Microsoft email seems to have quirks sending out emails now too.

3) Don’t know if it is an Apple iOS/tvOS16.1 issue or T-Mobile change issue, but watching services through Apple TV has had streaming services like Disney, Hulu, Amazon say oops, we can’t connect or your are offline, this is sporadic.

Signal strength and quality haven’t changed. I check the numbers monthly.

If this were a deliberate decision, T-Mobile may be causing issues with the way other company’s products work.

I hope this is a technical error.

S

in Phoenix area too. These changes may be the cause of our unpleasant experience recently.
 

1) We have a Ting Fire device that monitor’s the electrical wiring of our home and it sends information out. It went offline. Couldn’t get it to work, but took the device to a neighbors house and no issues…

2) Had challenges joining a homeowner’s association meeting. The HOA property management firm uses Microsoft Teams. I was able to get on after a couple attempts. Microsoft email seems to have quirks sending out emails now too.

3) Don’t know if it is an Apple iOS/tvOS16.1 issue or T-Mobile change issue, but watching services through Apple TV has had streaming services like Disney, Hulu, Amazon say oops, we can’t connect or your are offline, this is sporadic.

Signal strength and quality haven’t changed. I check the numbers monthly.

If this were a deliberate decision, T-Mobile may be causing issues with the way other company’s products work.

I hope this is a technical error.

 Yeah it’s absolutely a T-Mobile issue. I can replicate from and iPhone or Windows computer connected to the T-Mobile home router gateway device. You can test it by opening a command prompt in windows and typing ping 8.8.8.8 and hit enter. You should just get no response in the output. You can replace 8.8.8.8 with whatever you want. For teams it is teams.microsoft.com

i suggest everyone call T-Mobile, maybe if they get enough calls they will take it seriously. 

W

I’ve been down this path with multiple companies recently. Call centers in the Philippines will never report this up the chain, no matter how many call in. I believe that is where 611 goes most of the time now; I never get Abq call center anymore.

IMO. This would have to become newsworthy and hit a news cycle, or it will be ignored.

BugPlusWont
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Hi, I too wish T-Mobile would fix this, and that the issue deserves to be newsworthy!

I have been having major issues related to my T-Mobile home internet, primarily devices like home assistants and their accessories that rely on lower latency to fulfil requests. My Nest Mini now takes on average 10 full seconds to begin loading the response. Beyond that, issues with security since my cameras have increased lag making my doorbell camera less useful, and problems with my DNS not able to properly filter the web. I’m not the only one and neither are any of you:

 



Clearly this is an aggressive rollout of provisioning. To report my locale, I’m in the PNW but most of you are in the South/Midwest states like Texas. Well, location doesn’t seem to matter IMO as I still have noticed many issues recently, to the timeframe given in this forum, in where my web filter has not been able to deny requests properly on one of my home computers. I believe ICMP details noted are related.

Sadly enough, I am JUST learning how to network in college, in my second year and taking classes related specifically to latency and ping... So just wanted to note that I am genuinely affected by this… My own learning material has me doing these types of ICMP ping requests in Windows, and some posts here are lining up with my college material, but while learning from other members here has been fun, it also means to realize that my learning just got a lot harder BECAUSE of my fervent interest in bleeding-edge wireless tech… It doesn’t have to be this way!

When testing using Fast.com and other methods, I’m anywhere between 50ms and 1.2seconds loaded for latency. While that hasn’t been an issue, what’s different is that now never reporting the lower number. One second of latency means I can pretty much throw away my Xcloud membership LMAO I have much better results playing using my phone’s mobile hotspot.

Other tests, like Edge’s in-browser utility, no longer can report latency at all and therefore the program hangs. Just as another user said, it makes it harder for a given person who doesn’t know what’s going on understand what’s happening. This issue is compounded when the customers end up calling staff who have no source of truth for information on ping/latency leading to no progress for either party.

All in all, this is snowballing quickly and the best action really is to roll back these changes or communicate the incoming fixes. At minimum, progress in this would feel like acknowledging that the official stance isn’t that “ping isn’t used anymore” by T-Mobile and instead the stance customers want to see would be closer to working on a solution to the existing latency and ICMP problem for T-Mobile Home Internet users Nationwide.

Thanks to other forum members here, I understand now that if I want to continue to effectively filter my web I now need an addition device, a VPN (a hardware solution akin to a PfSense router) between my modem and personal router… and I would rather configure my own hardware like the ASUS modem I had before, but T-Mobile Home Internet does not support other hardware even if I did try and use a hotspot or 3rd-Party 5G Modem. I really don’t want a bunch of networking equipment at home, I’d wanna leave that for school lol... so it’s horrible to see this provisioning and clearly it’s basically “love it or leave it” unless we outcry. So I’d like to join you all in a big +1 @inductivesoul  @iTinkeralot @ShanStewart @Walkabt  and ask T-Mobile to sympathize with customers, geeks and nerdy students alike and cool it with the way their locking down these gateways.

S

Hi, I too wish T-Mobile would fix this, and that the issue deserves to be newsworthy!
 

Please call T-MOBILE and have them escalate this issue. 

J
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I live in WV and started noticing the ping issue rear its ugly head on Friday. I first thought it was something on my network going bad or my ad blocker messing up but narrowed it down to T-Mobile. I'm with everyone else, I can't understand why they are blocking such a critical thing. Glad to see that I'm not alone in the issue.

W

I hope more people realized there is an issue, find this post, sign in and post. This has to get to 40 pages in my mind before something happens to make this newsworthy.

Here’s my perspective, I’ve called in on several issues on different products recently, writing to a half dozen companies as a heads up that there are problems and neither issue has been resolved or hit the media.

  1. Apple Airplay2 functionality is busted in iOS/iPadOS 16 on non-Apple devices. It may, or may not, have to do something with Apple Home App and Matter integration standards. I can find a lot more articles on issues for this topic right now on Reddit and other sites but none appear to connect the dots between products - they are focused on one manufacturer’s product, when the issue is Apple AND the manufacturer. From Sonos to Belkin, to receiver manufacturers like Yamaha and Onkyo this is big. This specific issue has been known since July when beta testers were testing the new iOS software and reported it. Airplay2 still works correctly in Mac OS - Ventura. Go to Belkin.com and look up their Soundform Connect and that device’s questions page has customers giving it bad reviews because of the issue blaming Belkin for selling the device that doesn’t work. Belkin’s response has been to please reach out to a special email address to get support. Airplay2 worked, pre iOS 16, then the issues started (the changes in the Home App’s code were being implemented due to upcoming Matter integration). While I am significantly impacted having multiple zones in my home using receivers to send AirPlay information to from my phones or iPads, most people probably just use Apple TVs and Apple Home Pod minis and don’t experience the issue, since Apple’s own devices don’t have the issue.
  2. Amazon has been selling a device for at least two years where each device’s ethernet port of that product is hard coded with the same MAC address making them useless on ethernet if you have more than two devices - you can use over WI-FI... There are threads from the US and India on it, but none are more than four pages long. There are now reviews on Amazon saying the issue, I put a review one out there, it was reviewed by Amazon, but the group that received my call, the group that reviewed my review are not the development team and that’s who needs to see it OR an executive of the company. There are several options to fix, including spoofing a MAC address in the device firmware but it has gone no where. Too niche of an issue and not newsworthy. These are higher end products, sold by Amazon, and since WI-FI works for most that’s the resolution from support.

This issue is too new, and our situation is a little more unique than we may like to admit. It impacts us, and some of us more than others, but the average user probably just thinks it is the “the tower is under construction”. Here’s the headlines I have seen recently that are newsworthy to T-Mobile

  1. everyone loves T-Mobile; https://www.tmonews.com/2022/10/t-mobile-earns-highest-score-in-j-d-power-2022-us-business-wireless-satisfaction-study/
  2. we could be facing an uphill battle - I’ve only seen this report on one site, yet it seems like this is a bigger concern overall, to me. https://thedesk.net/2022/08/t-mobile-home-internet-problems-tower-upgrades/

 

 

 

 

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