i live right in the center of my city my phones all have full bars and my data speeds are much higher on my phones then the home internet i just got and for the life of me i can only get 3-4 bars never the full 5 super annoyed, am i missing something? should i just call t mobile and see if something is wrong?
Several things to keep in mind.
First, the bars shown on the gateway and in the app are both for the primary 4G signal only. Not sure if your phone is showing the 5G signal strength instead. Your phone and the gateway might also have different parameters for what makes a “5 bar” signal. To get more specific details about both the 4G and 5G signals, you need to use the T-Mobile Internet app. Click on the “MORE” tab and go to “Advanced cellular metrics”. As I understand it, the quality of the 5G signal is the most important for download speed and the 4G (primary) for upload. It is possible that the phones are able to pull in a better signal though. I believe others on this site have implied as much.
Second, T-mobile Home Internet is deprioritized in relation to phone traffic, so cellular phone data will almost always perform better than the gateway.
Third, you can get quite good speeds with 3 or 4 bar signals. I believe the bars are determined by only the RSRP value, but SNR (SINR) is also very important to the quality of the signal. For example, I have a 3 bar primary signal and a 4 bar 5G (secondary) signal and current Speedtest shows 276Mbps down and 32Mbps up – better than T-Mobile promises.
Finally, because Home Internet gets deprioritized, if the towers you’re connecting to have a lot of traffic, whether your signal is good or bad, your speed will take a significant hit. I’ve been fortunate so far to not have that problem.
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