I got sick of the constant downtime that I experienced with Cox every time a tropical storm came through Louisiana, so I decided to give T-Mobile a try. There’s no phone lines to fall down so the internet is always up, right? And since I already have 4 phone lines and 3 cellular devices with T-Mobile, it seemed like the right course of action and the price was attractive, although I would GLADLY PAY MORE for faster data (I can keep dreaming, right?)
WRONG.
T-Mobile home internet goes down like 5 times a day. I used to call it in but it happens now so frequently that it’s a waste of time. They would tell me they’re doing upgrades and to wait it out, toggle the power switch on/off and it usually came back on in 3-4 minutes. I stuck with T-Mobile thinking those “upgrades” would pay off, but they haven’t and it’s actually taken a turn for the worse. The outages are now lasting between 5-10 minutes and on top of that, I have an entirely new problem that didn’t exist before: LOW SIGNAL STRENGTH.
For 7 months, my gateway has been sitting in the same exact place. It’s positioned right in front of the window, on top of 4 milk crates because it’s the only place in the house where I can get 4 bars, but that’s all come to an end because all of the sudden, out of nowhere, I only gets 2 bars now. This happened about 4 days ago and I haven’t moved any furniture or anything, it just dropped from 4 bars to 2 and there’s no other place in the house where I can get a decent signal. The only way I can get 3 bars, is IF I TAKE IT OUTSIDE.
What’s strange is that the symptoms are not consistent. Sometimes the cellular will go out on all my devices (which makes sense if T-Mobile is working on the tower) but other times, it’s just the home internet that goes down. It’s about 50/50. Do gateways just go bad? Is there any kind of extender?
