Question

Home internet speeds extremely inconsistent and connection drops intermittently

  • 12 March 2021
  • 41 replies
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I've never had any problem with T-Mobile in home 5g broadband before I live only 0.29 miles from the T-Mobile tower. I'm getting a constant 700Mb/100mb on my gaming desktop night and day with no slow downs at all. I can stream multiple TVs at the same time. I use at least a terabyte a month.

M

Well, 4 weeks and 4 “Customer Support” sessions later, the silver cylinder is on its way back to TMobile. Despite the promises and good will of the front line support and their Manager, Engineering never really addressed the problem of dropped packets and inconsistent speeds. I think the two are closely related and, most likely, are a function of cell traffic. The nonsense “fixes” that Engineering came up with were: 1. Downgraded the speed to 50 Mbps and 2. Looked at the distance from the cell tower and the signal strength/quality. Since these criteria are OK then, I don’t have any problem and case closed.

This thinking is so flawed in so many levels that I decided it was time for me to move on. So, for the time being, I am staying with my Frontier Fios (consistently 50/50Mbps, 9 msec ping). In a year or so I may give TMobile 5G another try.

C

Got excited and switch to TMo 5G Internet. At first, the speeds were good, 50-150Mbps up, 25-60Mbps down. Then when I started using it on the daily basis, I started to notice it’s very inconsistent. Sometimes both the down & up speeds are even lower than 1Mbps, especially starting around 6pm. The down speed does recover most of the time after a few minutes to an acceptable speed, usually 15-25Mbps, but the up speed often takes longer time to recover. Even when it recovers, it stays below 15Mbps. 

My tower signal is always 3 bar for 4GLTE b66, and 4 bar for 5G n71.
My previous provider Spectrum speed was always consistent 150+Mbps up & ~10Mbps down. 

 

0
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Many people post about poor speed but never post there signal levels and readings. IMO 95% of the issues are signal quality that can be solved with an external antenna. It’s really to bad the connection is not there by default.

 

N

Same sort of issue here. Got the modem 4 weeks ago,  I get 250+ for a week, then < 20 the next week. Basically alternates about every week or so.  Called customer service about 6 times.  getting annoying.  Not sure what their engineers are doing.

P

Same here like everyone, home internet was working fine then started to slow down 👎👎👎

Nothing I do fixed, 007bondM16 mentioned an external antenna!!

Never heard that there is an external antenna, where you can get it? How to get it? Price?

Anyone knows??

0
Userlevel 5
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Same here like everyone, home internet was working fine then started to slow down 👎👎👎

Nothing I do fixed, 007bondM16 mentioned an external antenna!!

Never heard that there is an external antenna, where you can get it? How to get it? Price?

Anyone knows??

Ah ask.

 

https://www.waveform.com/products/mimo-panel-kit-for-hotspots-routers?variant=39349359476839

 

FYI from the TMHI Facebook page

Hi folks! Waveform.com will be having a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale starting on 11/22. I talked to our online sales team and they created a early access 15% off coupon for our popular MIMO antenna kits and individual RSRF-branded antennae just for this group!

This early access code is only valid until 11:59pm on 11/21, after that there will be a different code and discounts for other products.

Coupon code is: TMOBF21

Clicking this link will automatically apply the code as well:

https://www.waveform.com/discount/TMOBF21

Remember, if you guys ever have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to message/@me or contact one of our sales associates via live chat, email, or telephone.

0
Userlevel 5
Badge +5

Same here like everyone, home internet was working fine then started to slow down 👎👎👎

Nothing I do fixed, 007bondM16 mentioned an external antenna!!

Never heard that there is an external antenna, where you can get it? How to get it? Price?

Anyone knows??

https://www.waveform.com/products/mimo-panel-kit-for-hotspots-routers?variant=39349359476839

I tried to post a discount code but got moterated

 

L
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I installed a mimo panel antennae it helped a littel with the signal but im like everyone else 3mi from tower 50 hours on phone with tech in singapore telling me they are working on towers for 2 months noe they are finished and its just as bad as ever. i range from .2 to 25mbps 25mbps is rare and in theearly morning hours until 8am it drops immedialty to maybe 1-2 and signal bounces between that and .2 mbps ping is fairly constant 25-45 upload runs fairly consistent around 8 mbps all the time so tmobile can recieve my signal in a consistent matter. the dumps are always as people come online i live in a very rural area so not a lot of people my tower is along the I5 interstate hwy as are most of the towers but i can only connect to the one im on. ive driven and tested every tower with amazing speeds  until i get to my tower and got 6 mbps looking right at it. alll the others were 50-90 mbps total run around from tech support. network allocation is garbage. really cant wait to change as soon as im able.

rsri ,92-94

snr 10

rsrq -13

rssi -69

G
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I am having similar issues with my Home Internet.  Download speeds jump anywhere between 15-70Mbps, but Upload speeds are consistently below 1Mbps.  I also experience 10+ disconnections per day, about a third of those requiring a manual reboot to the 5G gateway.

S

I received my home internet 2 days ago and I have a gamer at home who uses it constantly. Well the connected LAN was only giving us <10 and it was connected directly! I called in and I live  in Florida so they informed me that they are working on the towers that are close by me. So I have to wait 2-3 days. I am hoping this works out I work from home and Comcast is expensive and network is lagging so much here if I want a good deal I have to resign a 2-yr agreement with them and I honestly don’t want to as I can’t even only get internet I HAVE to get TV and cable in order for my bill to go down. I will update in a few days to see if our internet is doing better with T-mobile. My boyfriend and I are really trying to be positive about the issue with the inconsistency of the speed and believing it can be the “fixing issue” they are doing 

M

I got my TMobile gateway today. Set up was quick and painless using the app but that’s where the fun stopped. Performnce was disapointing: Latency in the 40 to 130msec, Download speed anywhere from 1.8 to 74 Mbps, Upload speed, consistently higher than download, anywhere from 5 to 80 Mbps. My home is less than ½ mile from the cell tower, signal is 4 bars anywhere in the house.

I spent over 2 hours with Tech support, running tests and collecting data. I was also told that by the end of the month, when work on the neighboring tower is completed (sounds familiar?), performance will improve. I asked for an escalation of my problem but no such group exists; the data collected will go directly to engineering and I’ll hear back in a couple of days.

I am eager to dump Frontier and wanted this thing to work but, unless I see consistent performance (I’ll settle for a predictable 20 Mbps) I may have to look elsewhere.

I will update when I hear back from Support

E
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I got our T-Mobile Home Internet yesterday. I have 4 bars and T-Mobile tells me I have a good 5G signal. The download speeds have varied from 0.1 Mbps to 25 Mbps, and upload speeds of 8.0 to 20 Mbps. I’ve turned off everything electrical in the area with no gain in speed.

I live on two very busy roads, US-93 it’s the road to Las Vegas, and Pierce Ferry Rd the road to the Grand Canyon West. I don’t know if T-Mobile adjusted for thousands of cars and ten 40 passenger tour buses full of people all sending video back home. If you look at Dolan Springs Arizona you’ll see we’re in the boonies so cell towers are few and far between. 

So tired of Frontiers 2-5Mbps speeds...

P

We jumped on home internet service as soon as we heard about it. For a long time now, Comcast has been the only choice in Baltimore City and it feels like they squeeze city residents to subsidize lower prices for their customers in the counties where they have competition. Our current Comcast bill is just over $100 per month with their most basic service, a bundled Internet + TV. We don’t even use the TV service but they wouldn’t give us a plan with just internet service. This costs us about $110/month. I can plug my brother’s address (he has  VZ Fios) in on the Comcast website and get offers for $39.99/month. I’ve been looking for a way to break free of Comcast for years now so I want to love this service but it’s just not measuring up.

We had one of the mobile internet gateways delivered on 3/9. I started testing it immediately and was consistently getting speeds well over 300Mbps down on the first floor of my house. I even hit above 400Mbps a few times. So I went ahead and put that gateway at the head of the network, replacing the cable modem. The good speeds continued for a bit but, not long after that, I noticed the gateway would intermittently lose it’s connection and the speed had dropped quite a bit. I’ve seen as low as 3Mbps down but that it generally stayed at just about 25Mbps. Checking the LCD at the top of the router, I could see that it was disconnected when our internet stopped working or that I had between 2-3 bars. I have 2 kids in school zoom meetings from 9am - 3:30pm and my wife and I are in and out of zoom meetings from 9am - 5pm. We were constantly getting disconnected due to the internet going down completely or due to the DSL speeds I haven’t seen since 2005. WiFi in my house is problematic due to plaster walls and metal lath so I figured it had something to do with that.

I went to https://www.cellmapper.net/ and found the closest T-Mobile 5g tower was about 3.25 miles away. Luckily, my house is in one of the highest areas of the city and my 2nd floor bedroom window faces the nearest towers with a fairly unobstructed path to them. I drilled some holes and ran an ethernet cable down to the living room router. At this point, the gateway was sitting just far back enough from my bedroom window to avoid direct sunlight and had a pretty clear path to the closest tower. The display showed 4 bars consistently. However, the speed and connectivity issues persisted.

I just got off the phone with T-Mobile Home Internet tech support and got a line that seems a little too much of a coincidence when you take into account the other coincidences. The support rep asked me if I experienced this trouble before 3/9 because their engineers just started working on the tower I was connected to on 3/9 and it explains my trouble. I’m willing to wait for this work to be completed but he said it could take up to a month.

So these are the coincidences so far:

  1. Most of the time, I get right around 25Mbps. It happens enough that the support rep was able to ask me to retry a speed test immediately after getting a <10Mbps speed test back and it would be >25Mbps. Then he’d say, “There you go. I made an adjustment and now you’re getting 25Mbps, which is the base speed”. The speed issue seems more like throttling since it’s keeping me right at 25Mbps most of the time.
  2. The problem I’m seeing started on the day I received the equipment and just happens to be affecting the only tower my gateway is connecting to.
  3. The work their engineers are doing could take up to a month. Just enough time for them to charge me for another month before I cancel.

Maybe this is just paranoid me talking but I’m not trusting some of what I was told. I’d love to be wrong about this though. Anyone had a similar experience? Was it eventually fixed? How long did that take? My whole neighborhood is waiting to hear how this pans out. So many people are sick to death of Comcast that they may have to abandon Baltimore altogether once most of us jump ship for T-Mobile.

Rant over but I’d love to hear from people who’ve had similar experiences or who may have advice for improving my service.

Thanks,

Matt

I get the same response. They are working on a tower near me every time I call they are trying to say that it is horrible. I just bought a new Samsung UHD for 8K TV and the picture is horrible since the home T-Mobile Internet. I called three times in four days and got the same response that they are working on my tower. I guarantee you tomorrow you will have a great picture. I need to switch ASAP thank you for your comment approve me that they are bs me. 

P

hi, thanks for posting this. I had it. I had T-Mobile Internet for a week now and I called maybe five times and every time I called they said they are working on the tower near me and I promise you within a couple days, you will have perfect servicethey are always working on my tower, it’s a joke they must be trained to say that. I live in Philadelphia. Thanks for your post. It proves me that they are lying to me and their service is horrible home Internet anyway, thanks again, Ron

M

My speed this evening is .11 mbps.  Yes, not 11, but .11 which is less than one.  I had the same problem this morning at 2:00 a.m.  I have had speeds as fast as 156 mbps.    1When I first installed my T Mobile internet it was blazing fast.  Now, it is sometimes blazing fast, and sometimes, it takes over a minute before my speed indicator moves.  My problem is I need consistently high speed internet when I am working.  And it isn’t slow because of low priority, as I have this problem when I begin my work, which is 2:00 a.m .  So, what gives.  I am now looking into returning to COX internet.   If you are just going to use it for surfing the web or Netflix, it will work ok.  But for streaming, it will only work occasionally.

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