My tmobile cell tower is overloading my router settings to make it worse

I went to CellMapper and looked up the eNB ID you listed and the gNB ID 2161772 - NR tower is the only n41 I can see recorded in the area which appears to be down east of WA state community college and west of 177. That sort of makes sense given T-Mobile tends to deploy the n41 cells closer to colleges. Well, here that is the case. That isn’t to say that is the only n41 cell in the area but that seems to be the only one that is recorded in their database. There appear to be a fair number of n71 cells deployed about the area so T-Mobile was clearly pushing for coverage when they initially deployed the 5G in the area. They could probably use a few more n41 cells in the area. That would probably account for more congestion. Insufficient bandwidth and too many users on the n41. Keep in mind when there are phone connections on the cell they are prioritized better than the home internet gateway connections so yes it seems congestion could well be related. 

If you can get T-Mobile support to provide you with the location of the cell your gateway connects to for the 5G I would suggest to find out. Do watch the PCI values as CellMapper.net may not have the information in the database but if you have an Android phone you can download the CellMapper mobile application and then with an account you can upload the information to the CellMapper servers. IF more people would upload the 5G cell information into the CellMapper database it would be helpful. The unfortunate thing is there is no iPhone compatible CellMapper application. I believe this is due to how Apple makes access to the cellular info more restricted. 

I agree the http or https websites should load and render pretty quickly, but i am not convinced the theory about the router being over amplified as the problem. Sorry, I am not trying to argue with you it is just a difference of opinion. My logic is pretty simple. The cellular metrics represent the radio signal strength, quality, signal to noise ratio and the bands for the transmissions. In your original post the 4G LTE signal went from b66 to b71 and back to b66. The more recent one also reflects b66 as the signal so the frequency from that cell should be as before, assuming it is the same LTE cell source. Without the PCI you cannot tell. The original metrics you posted reflected the gateway had received 5G on the n41 frequency which is the midband millimeter frequency. The current metrics reflect the 5G signal is from a different cell that is n71 so that is a lower gigahertz frequency. So, we are not always comparing apples to apples here. Another factor to consider is the distance to the cell source and external influences that can result in the signal being degraded in flight. The reference signal receive power for the b66 is a bit poor and is a cell edge strength so I would expect that to be slower. The reference signal receive power for the n71 at -87 is good and the reference signal receive quality at -11 is also good. The signal to noise ratio for both signals are also good so there is nothing about those recorded values that suggest the gateway is being over amplified. 

Just for comparison:

My 4G LTE is a bit stronger signal than yours and it is a B2 signal. (different frequency)

The 5G I receive is a n41 and it is NOW -10 dBm less than the n71 I received for over a year.

The signal to noise ratio went up recently, and signal quality went up. Performance went up too after T-Mobile turned on an n41 cellular source which appears to have replaced the n71 we had.

This test was ran just before 5 pm EST and that is with n41. With the prior n71 5G the best I would receive for download testing would be ~185 Mbps. This us using the same reference server every time. I set the preferred server to test against and I run the test from my MacBook Pro on a wired Ethernet connection over the Nokia gateway I have had since January 2021. 

You might have a gateway that is just not working very well. You don’t report which model it is but given you are taking the cellular metrics from an Android phone with the mobile application I can only speculate that it is either the Arcadyan or the newer Sagemcon gateway. Maybe the gateway is a lemon? It does happen. Maybe the cells the gateway connects with are having heavy traffic loading and as a result more bandwidth throttling which results in the lag and delays. I tend to believe the problem is possibly in the cellular tower or the backhaul and traffic prioritization. It could be the gateway is not behaving well. Sorry I just don’t buy the over amplified theory. Nothing in the data I have seen supports such a theory. Any cellular operator has to follow strict guidelines when transmitting their frequencies. The reference signal receive power RSRP values do not suggest anything out of the ordinary.

So you recorded the SINR = 40 value reported from two of the first cellular metric recordings. I think one thing to consider or question to ask is, how accurate is the recording/reporting device or application that is being used? If the values reported are truly accurate or not we cannot be sure. It may depend upon the software and the interpretation of the available information. One thing I learned long ago is to always question the data and not take it at face value. I find the mobile application to be buggy and often will hang up and fail on my iPhone 12 Pro to the point that I have had to reboot my phone because the app crashed and hung everything up. Do I trust that application. No I do not.

Below according to XYXEL Networks 

SINR

SINR (Signal Interference + Noise Ratio) also called CINR (Carrier to Interference + Noise Ratio) is the ratio of the signal level to the noise level (or simply the signal-to-noise ratio). The SINR value is measured in dB (dB). It's simple: the higher the value, the better the signal quality. At SINR values below 0, the connection speed will be very low, since This means that there is more noise in the received signal than the useful part, and the probability of losing a connection also exists.

Your most recent record of the n71 cellular metrics reflects the SINR = 14 which is good but not excellent. Still a pretty clean signal at 14. I have to question the n41 reporting a value of 40 for accuracy as i don’t trust the TMO mobile application nor am I very impressed with the Arcadyan or Sagemcon gateways. The Nokia also has a few warts but I have grown fond of mine after reading various conversations about the warts of the other two gateways. 

WE, you, me or any other subscriber does not have control to get a lock on a given cell. You can contact support and IF you get with a really good support engineer that listens to what you are asking and also will take the request up the chain to a higher level support engineer then you might be able to get them to move the preference or lock to one of the n71 towers. They can see where your gateway gets a signal source and can preference the signal source IF they will. I have seen conversations where users have had success with this. I think, in part, it is holding a respectful, polite conversation with the engineer and requesting the connection preference/lock where you have seen it provide a respectable level of service. Please and thank you are always appreciated. 

I worked as an enterprise network escalation support engineer for 22 years. Our team dealt with what we referred to as the ugly 5%. I know how important it is to take care with the conversation and work for a mutual outcome. If you are respectful it is usually more helpful. Sometimes you have to ask to talk to someone else. A support engineer that is treated with mutual respect is more likely to work harder for you. I have dealt with many very difficult, demanding customers but also some that were just elated I had flown in to work out the problems. I always appreciated the forgiving customers even though they could still be demanding. They had to be as they had superiors demanding answers from them. In the end when the problem is resolved it is a good feeling of achievement. 

Until the n41 cells are properly vetted the n71 may be a more comfortable place. From January 2021 to March-April of 2022 the n71 cell we can use was unstable only twice about 3-4 days each time. When T-Mobile recently moved us onto an n41 cell I was instantly apprehensive as I had seen numerous community conversations about problems when on the n41 cell source. So far in this location the n41 has been just as solid as the n71 and shows no symptoms of congestion. I really suspect that what you were seeing was just that. It could be the prioritization of the traffic on the n41 cells in the area or some other configurations need to be improved to make it sing. You will not get as much potential for blazing speeds out of the n71 but it may be more stable and provide a solid average for speeds. I would take stable over flashy fast when the flashy fast is unreliable. Could the problem be buffer bloat? Maybe.

If the community is hungry for lower cost internet and users are flocking to T-Mobile for the home internet solution in the area then they may be selling more subscriptions than the current infrastructure can properly handle. The 5G internet solutions are still maturing and cellular delivery is not a simple venture. As you stand up cells you also have to make sure the back haul can handle the end user demands. If the upstream pipes cannot carry the volume of course you have issues.  Then more investment must be made and well timelines and plans are all good but not always properly executed.

The excessive latency of ICMP packets and loss appears to be due to T-Mobile throttling them. It is probably not related to the slow ramp up of the sessions. The throttle of ICMP also breaks trace routing which is also a nuisance as both are important for troubleshooting. They are exercising excessive controls and it is tarnishing the solution. 
mid you run a Wireshark packet capture while executing a download or other activities and then run the expert analysis it should provide some clarity on the behavior. If you have never run a packet capture with Wireshark it is a little bit of a learning curve. Understanding packet structure and protocols and how TCP/IP functions is also rather important but that can be learned. Research on the web can provide a great deal of information and tutorials. It is a huge time sink. Been there and done that. I had my CCNP certification for years and had to test for recertification every 2-3 years. It was a huge pain but kept us current and on top of our game. 

The retransmissions and the errors are not too much of a surprise to me actually. If you take a packet capture when executing the speedtest.net test the blast of packets is pretty rapid. I saw similar behavior. If you take a more normal download, say a download of a smaller Linux ISO file and take a partial capture to have a reasonable sample period that should be enough. If you run a longer capture and collect a huge volume of packets it can take a bit to process and can be a bit excessive as a shorter capture that provides a profile period is fine and acceptable. You can see the basic operation and examine how things function. 

I think part of that capture might be due to the extreme rate of packet flow. When I want to look at the behavior I have done so with a smaller Linux ISO that does not have a whole bunch of extra files for installation. A small distribution just to exercise the gateway and not have a huge packet capture. Something around 800 Mb to 1 Gig in size is more than enough. Just capture enough to profile the operation then stop the capture and then cancel the rest of the download. 

for anyone who wants to test actual loading of websites and not just some speedtest muti connection test of bandwidth you never get use go to https://speed.cloudflare.com/ and it will show you how fast your internet really is for small files which is the exact problem i was having but i couldn’t show it, i knew i would figure it out.

I have been doing screen recordings of when it gets slow along with a active speed meter on screen and then i would show the file size and directly do a speedtest right after 

here are my awful results i have been dealing with after day 3 (oct 20th) of home internet, you can see for 100k and 1MB downloads how bad they are and the M for the results at bottom is in Mbit

Nice features and details. The drop down options for more details & the dialog boxes when hovering over specific data. Really well done. I can see using this. Very handy!

By referring them to the community conversation you have good evidence that your service is extremely poor compared to what they advertise. The connection I now have on 5G is the n41 frequency. We had n71 but this pretty much doubled the speeds we previously received. Well the upload speeds have not changed as much as the download but the 4G LTE seems to handle the uploads.

If they look at the data and have another cell in the area that is a possible source for you maybe they will change the gateway service over. i have seen them do that. They know exactly where your gateway is due to the SIM card and the information it holds. 

Cloud Flare flies with style. Not only is that informative it is a great interface as well.