Question

Home internet speeds extremely inconsistent and connection drops intermittently

  • 12 March 2021
  • 41 replies
  • 16112 views
M
Userlevel 2
Badge

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

41 replies

M
Userlevel 1

I've figured out how to fix this problem.

1. You call Verizon.....

L
Badge

It's always a tower "being upgraded" and there are always two towers near you that they'll swear your gateway is switching between. They'll tell you they're rooting your gateway to one tower and then hang up. Nothing is ever resolved. I'm this close ||.

M
Userlevel 2
Badge

Well things are looking up. I had a laptop connected to the T-Mobile gateway running a speed test every 5 minutes and dumping the results to a csv file. The issue seems to have been resolved yesterday so I’ve connected the home network to the gateway and we’re all giving it a shot today. So far, no disconnections and we have 3 simultaneous video calls happening. Perhaps there was just a problem with one of the towers.

 

 

D
Userlevel 5
Badge +5

Something everyone needs to remember about their home internet:

 

It is the lowest priority in the queue.

 

Which means in times of high utilization , your packets will be some of the last ones to get through the buffers.

 

No idea what that utilization threshold is... could be 80%, 70%, 60%... whatever value they feel is appropriate to secure faster throughput for the phone users over the home internet devices.

 

May want to pay attention to a few details at the speedtest site:

 

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it will home in on a location out in left field because of where Tmobile has routed the 464 tunnel they are using.  Not kidding, it has dumped me in Kansas as my best/closest test location--I live roughly 70 miles inland from Myrtle Beach, SC.  It pays to use the Change Server link to consistently pick the same site every time.... may find you need to reboot the unit to try to secure better pathing.

 

Also keep an eye on the latency/jitter numbers it reports.  Jitter is an indicator of how much each subsequent ping is varying.  When these numbers ramp up for the same test site, it is an indicator your packets are getting held in the queue longer and longer... an indication that either your tower or elsewhere along the route is getting congested.  Again, you may be able to remedy that somewhat with a reboot.  I find relocating it first helps a lot (I have 4 TMobile antennas nearby and distance to them all are within about 1/2 mile difference, so I can almost literally "point" it differently to switch bands/towers sometimes).

 

If you haven't yet, may want to get the Tmobile Home Internet app for your smartphone.  They  have two apps--one is specifically for monitoring/managing your home internet router, the other is for generic account stuff.  The app has a "more" section that will give you stats on the connection, as well as a quick restart option.  You can make a note of which position/angle puts you on which antenna (CID) as well as which band is in play, along with signal strength and overall quality (CQI), and how it all coordinates with your throughput/latency.  This may help you narrow down a couple positions to move the device to for optimizing things during the more troubled times.

For example, I have settled on my default location as just above my bedroom TV, kinda in front of a window.  Alternet locations for other bands are on top of my PC monitor to the right along an adjacent outside wall pointing towards another tower, or two spots on a dresser to the left on the other side of the same double window where I can "aim" it towards two other towers.

M
Userlevel 2
Badge

My IP geolocates to Boston MA for some reason. Speedtest.net constantly routes me to servers in MA. I’ve submitted a request to have the geoIP data corrected at https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-data-correction-request/ but it takes a while to make the change and I get a new IP often enough that I doubt I’ll still have it by the time it’s changed, if it’s changed at all. So, for now, I have a cron job running a speedtest every 15 minutes and dumping the results to a .csv file that I can use to plot my speed results after a few days.

I

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’m with you on this, my internet completely drops! that’s the only thing that is Consistent

M
Userlevel 2
Badge

This is what I have so far since setting up the speed test at 15 minute intervals. Points with no data are times when the service has been down. It’s actually been down much more often than this but that isn’t caught unless the downtime coincides with 0, 15, 30, or 45 minutes each hour.

 

Hopefully this all goes away when the problem with the tower is fixed becaus.e helping my 6 year old get back in his zoom meeting 1-2 times an hour isn’t sustainable

D
Badge

just a rant here and some info, have had home internet for about 2 weeks. Started at steady 100 mbps speeds up to about 120, was thrilled. Today stuck at 10 mbps and under all morning. If this continues I will dump them. I rebooted the router 5 times no luck. My phone was getting much higher reading 30mbps-100 mbps so congestion and priority are an issue. Customer service is horrible and a giant run around game. They cannot fix simply billing and account issues and just straight up lie to get you off the phone and end the call. Hate xfinity but considering them at this point as the cost is higher but in theory up to 400 mbps so might be my only option left. Ok sorry for rant, in Ann Arbor Mich. here. Clearly they have oversold and rolled out too aggressively and now congestion is a big problem. Greed.

H

TMOHI is a joke. I am in my first week of service and never get more than 3bars, in 5 different locations in my home. speed is never more than 12/8Mbps D/U and constantly drops internet connection completely, making it useless for online gaming -in addition to being unsuitable for a home with 13+ devices accessing my home network. paying $150+/mo for Xfinity was awful, but not as awful as this weak excuse for home internet and it's inability to provide even the most basic internet connectivity for the 21st century (absolute minimum 50/10Mbps D/U, IMHO).

I do find myself connecting to my VPN for slightly greater download speed, but packets still drop frequently, and ping is generally in excess of 60ms.

hopefully this "update" everyone speaks of arrives soon, or I am returning to Xfinity's highway robbery racket, post-haste.

M
Userlevel 1

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.

 

I live in an apartment that does not allow that. 

A

Thank you for sharing the negative and erratic download internet speed from 5G-TM-Home Internet.

1-The slow and erratic slow internet speed is VERY REAL + SYSTEMATIC.

2-The technician support team have been taught to go through routines to BUY TIME, not to solve the SLOW SPEED SIGNALS, bc it was beyond their pay-grades and related to financial feasibilities and city permits. Meanwhile they counted on these support team to “CALM + MANIPULATE” customers to just “HANG ON + TIGHT” but still need to pay.

3-The indicator of number of bar-graphic is very MISLEADING; for example, the gateway shown 4 bars, but the Oookla, shown ping of 2025ms, the DL 0.05 Mbps, and UL 0.00 and keep buffering til the final message: Sorry, there was no connection ….in that manner.

We hope that TM take note and solve the signal speed congestions, aka, dropping.

I feel bad for 8 support technicians’ pain (so far in the last 41 days)  for keep apologizing on behalf of those MAX profit grabbers. 

 

 

G

Something everyone needs to remember about their home internet:

 

It is the lowest priority in the queue.

 

Which means in times of high utilization , your packets will be some of the last ones to get through the buffers.

 

No idea what that utilization threshold is... could be 80%, 70%, 60%... whatever value they feel is appropriate to secure faster throughput for the phone users over the home internet devices.

 

May want to pay attention to a few details at the speedtest site:

 

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it will home in on a location out in left field because of where Tmobile has routed the 464 tunnel they are using.  Not kidding, it has dumped me in Kansas as my best/closest test location--I live roughly 70 miles inland from Myrtle Beach, SC.  It pays to use the Change Server link to consistently pick the same site every time.... may find you need to reboot the unit to try to secure better pathing.

 

Also keep an eye on the latency/jitter numbers it reports.  Jitter is an indicator of how much each subsequent ping is varying.  When these numbers ramp up for the same test site, it is an indicator your packets are getting held in the queue longer and longer... an indication that either your tower or elsewhere along the route is getting congested.  Again, you may be able to remedy that somewhat with a reboot.  I find relocating it first helps a lot (I have 4 TMobile antennas nearby and distance to them all are within about 1/2 mile difference, so I can almost literally "point" it differently to switch bands/towers sometimes).

 

If you haven't yet, may want to get the Tmobile Home Internet app for your smartphone.  They  have two apps--one is specifically for monitoring/managing your home internet router, the other is for generic account stuff.  The app has a "more" section that will give you stats on the connection, as well as a quick restart option.  You can make a note of which position/angle puts you on which antenna (CID) as well as which band is in play, along with signal strength and overall quality (CQI), and how it all coordinates with your throughput/latency.  This may help you narrow down a couple positions to move the device to for optimizing things during the more troubled times.

For example, I have settled on my default location as just above my bedroom TV, kinda in front of a window.  Alternet locations for other bands are on top of my PC monitor to the right along an adjacent outside wall pointing towards another tower, or two spots on a dresser to the left on the other side of the same double window where I can "aim" it towards two other towers.

I have the same issues. My TV is always buffering constantly even on my phone is buffering and I can't sign into the home internet app it's always telling me to reset it and it's not connected and I have the wrong password constantly telling me I have the wrong password but I don't have the proper password.

My HP stream top will not find the T-Mobile internet either I've called T-Mobile and it is much troubleshooting as I could and I went through my computer and checked all the settings and tried changing things around and it will not find tmobile but it finds every other network around here including my old network.

M
Userlevel 2
Badge
Current situation

 

3/9 situation

 

M
Userlevel 2
Badge
The one thing I can rely on is hitting almost spot on 25Mbps every few tests.

I’m going to have to setup a speed test monitor to record test results every 10 minutes over the next week and plot the results.

J

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 agree.  I am in Massachusetts and Comcast is screwing us big time.  I decided to try Tmob internet and was amazed.  Its just as good with weak signal (2 bars best I can get) as Comcast cable.  I couldn't believe it.   

M
Badge

Thank you for the cellmapper website. very useful. I was able to determine to which tower my gateway is connected just by looking at the PCI # and the band. In my case only the secondary signal is a 5G. Most of the time the gateway does not even connect to a secondary signal. My speeds are as high as 150 at 2am but as low as 1-2 Mbps during the day.

For those who don’t know already if the band starts with n (ex: n71) then it’s a 5G connection. if it starts with b its LTE.

In my case I mainly get LTE.

The Gateway has a miserable firmware and I cannot get the functionality I need. Can’t access my security cameras or NAS from internet because of no port forwarding. My VoIP phone does not work because the firewall blocks the SIP ports and there is no way around it. VPN works.

Frankly this service is not worth 50$

P

Having exactly same problem with home internet. If it doesn't get fixed soon may have to go back to cable which I really don't want to do as I left them for a reason. Tm home internet Started out at about 100 to 200 mbps. Now it's about 20-30mbps and videos buffer all the time. My phones still get good speeds, the 5g phone gets 300-400mbps on speed test but my 5g home internet is only 20-30mbps. If management is throttling home internet to only 20-30 mbps then I'll have to leave b/c cable is 200+mbps or greater consistently. Was expecting to get similar service on home internet as I do on my phone but it isn't happening. Spending a lot of money with t mobile and expect high speeds on ALL devices all the time. Especially the home internet, which should be highest priority on their network as we use it for work, meetings, school etc... 

T

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 started using this service in January and have been told that upgrades were in process and have been completed. Then every time I call they have issues with my two close towers. I did have a window from March 10-14 with speeds of 50-122 here in Minneapolis. That was the best I’ve seen here. Strangely about noon on 3/14 my speeds dropped below 20 and have stayed between 2-20 since then. Something does not add up. I’m ready to pull the plug.

B
Badge

It sure is consistent in lost connectivity, almost identical,  not like any isp used before.  Finding someone to send such graphs too is impossible, service relies on community instead of paying service techs, guess get what you pay for at 60 a month.

 

D
Userlevel 1
Badge

Just hit 3 weeks of Tmob home internet and am not impressed. Constant dropouts while watching the tube. Slow loading internet pages. Less than 1 mbps download speeds between 4pm and midnight. Currently 0.12 mbps at 7 pm. Definitely not worth $50 a month. Spectrum cable just lowered their price to $49.95 a month. I'm ready to switch. 

R

Speed swings and useless offshore customer service aside, T-Mobile has the worst account management Web site in the industry (worse even than TracFone before Verizon acquired that company). You’ve all read about repeated data breaches, which are evidence that software development is not a priority for this company.

In my case, it has proven impossible to link the phone number of the Internet gateway to the T-Mobile account I created at the T-mobile store when picking up the gateway. I was able to finish the account creation process, which involves creating a password, but every time I log in, I am immediately asked to link a phone number. When I enter the gateway’s phone number, I get the notorious F451 error.

I tried the other way, by starting with the phone number and creating a new account. If I enter the e-mail address I provided at the store, the site recognizes it and won’t let me create a new account. If I provide a different e-mail address, the site says I have to use the same e-mail address that I provided at the store. This makes sense because, as with any T-Mobile postpaid account, the account I created in-store has my biographic data, Social Security Number, state ID number, etc. (In the prepaid world, T-Mobile has none of those data, and one can associate any e-mail address.)

Since it’s impossible to link the phone number to a T-Mobile account, you can’t manage T-Mobile’s home Internet service online. You might be able to pay the bill as a guest (I haven’t tried), but that’s it!

It’s a particular concern for me because only downtown areas of major cities are eligible for the unlimited service. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in an urban city, but addresses in my city qualify only for the capped “lite” service. I’d want to be able to monitor my usage and know when I was approaching my monthly cap. (In the Bay Area, only addresses in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San José are eligible for the unlimited product, and even within those cities, only addresses in the high-value downtown areas will qualify. T-Mobile hasn’t made any network investments outside those areas -- you get LTE, rebranded as fake 5G.)

My box is going right back to the store tomorrow. The only good thing I can say is that T-Mobile is now using a more modern gateway, powered by USB-C (although you can’t use your own USB adapter unless it is a large one that supports laptop voltages and current levels -- 15 V 3 A, according to the manual).

The new gateway has no external antenna port (I’m not sure that the old one did, and I wouldn’t risk modifying a device I don’t own, that’s marked up to $370.)

T-Mobile is the worst of the three remaining US cell carriers, and its home Internet offering is essentially unusable. Do yourself a favor and keep your current ISP until some other company comes up with a truly good alternative.

 

D

I had excellent service with the TMobile home internet.  The moment I had troubles is when I switched my cell phones from Verizon to TMobile.  Turns out that we are de-prioritizing the Nokia gateway when our family is using magenta Max data on our phones.  I wasn't connecting the phones to the gateway to keep the load off of it and the phones had unlimited premium data.  Turns out all the devices in the house are sharing and fighting over the same bandwidth even if each individual device is on its own data.  It is causing so much issues.  I guess I should have kept Verizon phone services and just keep TMOBILE home internet only.  If you live close to someone using T-Mobile or Metro they will also be sharing your data.  My family lives next door and they are hurting our speeds as well when they use their metro phone (same tower as TMobile) to watch YouTube and want not.  They don't have home internet so they are always on their phones and they are close enough to our house that I know when they are watching YouTube.  Did some crazy testing to figure out our issue.

D

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 have same issues in Minnesota. Although I never had anything over 100mbps. I used to average 70-80 for the 1st 6 months. Now the last 1.5 years Ive been averaging 30mbps. But the service constantly cuts out and can’t keep up with 1 device….A sales Representative at the store said that he thinks the tower is overloaded because they are no longer offering  5g home internet to new customers in my area anymore. 

T

I have been incredibly disappointed with the download speeds. For the first few days, it was great, staying consistently between 50-70 Mbps (which I’m lucky to get in my area). Lately, I’m lucky to get 10 Mbps, and more often than not it’s down to 3 Mbps which is practically unusable. I am getting extremely frustrated.

Home Internet should be prioritized. I depend on this for both my jobs, and was promised “broadband speeds” which should be AT LEAST 25 Mbps. So far, that has not been delivered.

S

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

We just moved from Cox to T-Mobile Internet and it's horrendously slow. Can't even do a Zoom call without constant freezes and intermittent disconnections. Called support 3 times, on hold for more than 30 minutes, and each time they promise to call back. Still waiting...

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