Slow Home Internet

Above, I’m linking to a video from YouTube where a T mobile home internet user named Nate (his YouTube channel is “Nater Tater”) explains things about gateway location and how number of bars is not always related to best speed or connecting to the right band or band combination (2 bands for 5G) that will give you the best speeds.

Instead, it is about finding a location for the gateway that gives you the highest speeds on speed tests. In other words, let’s say you get only 2 bars. All 2 bar locations aren’t alike. You don’t say whether you were doing speed tests at each location you tried.

Nate explains how finding your tower location, and locating the gateway, perhaps in a window, closest to a that tower, can help you get the fastest and most stable connection for you. And then even fine tuning your gateway location, by rotating it, can improve the RSRP or SINR (or SNR). RSRP is a finer indication of signal strength the the more rough “number of bars.” 

He explains how higher figures are better on both of these, so an RSRP of -95 is better than an RSRP of -98, and with the SINR, which is signal to noise ratio, a 15 is better than an 11.

I’m in a rural area also, and at home, my 4G phone can alternate connecting between two towers, one which is 5 miles away and one which is 10 miles away. Fortunately, I don’t get this on my 5G home internet gateway. It connects to the closer tower only, and that has the desirable n41 mid-frequency 5G band, which gives me good download speeds of between 35 and 170, with no lagging problems.

To answer your question, what could have happened, that you were getting such consistently good speeds for a few months, and now in June you’re getting terrible speeds. Well, I can only guess, from the things I’ve read. If you have a 5G phone with a T mobile service, or have a friend who does and can do a speed test from your house, you can at least eliminate something going bad with your gateway. I know these 5G phones are still scarce. Still, if the speed on a T-mobile connected 5G phone is good from your house, then you know you need to replace the gateway.

T mobile and other companies can make equipment changes to a tower, and also do “tuning,” which could conceivably change your speed or signal, either way, for the better or the worse.

By “tuning,” that means making some adjustments, perhaps lowering or raising the transmission power, or adjusting the backhaul, which is equipment that is between the wireless tower equipment and their substation fiber connection to the internet.Suddenly, they make some change, and the signal you’re getting, in the few degrees of coverage to your location, is worse. Maybe it helped others, but  yours is worse.

As happened to Nate, sometimes a  company will be working on on a tower and then shift everyone to a neighboring tower for a while. But you would expect this is the type of thing they could have told you when you called up to tell them you got this bad speed drop in June. But maybe they give this kind of boiler plate steps to go through first to people. They’ll do that before they file a repair ticket, which I believe is something they do to more seriously check that your tower is functioning properly.

The GUI Nate speaks about, which is where you can find whether you’re getting a full non-standalone paired connection of a Primary and Secondary, and what bands you are on, is at:

192.168.12.1

Just stick that in the URL box of any page, and click on Overview on the left, and later, Status on the left, and the dropdown arrows to find the information. If you’re getting only a 1Mbps connection, they usually tend to go along with terrible connection period, so you might have to wait until you have some speed to even bring up the 192.168.12.1

Knowing and understanding all this stuff probably won’t help you get a faster speed, but it will help when you call T mobile, if you can tell them. “Hey, I’m connecting to a Primary signal only and not getting a 5G paired connection of Primary AND Secondary, what is up with that?”

Some people with a really slow connection do get a 5G pairing, but the GUI will allow you to see what it is, example B66/n71 or B66/n41.

I’ve read of instances where they install new equipment, and it takes them a week or more to ramp up the power, or tune it properly. They don’t always use full power at first because they are monitoring for possible signal conflicts with other towers.

City people have it easier when it comes to some of these problems, because they have more customers who are affected by a problem at the T mobile tower, and calling up to alert them to the same problem. In rural areas, you might be one of the only ones in your area that even has this service.

On the lack of information end, partly because 5G is so new, and companies are installing new equipment at a rapid pace, if you go back through older threads of other people who had speed drops like yours, few to none ever get a resolution, or they don’t get back to the board and tell how they resolved it.

Assuming your 5G phone is on T mobile also, this is a rare problem and reason to believe maybe something went wrong with your gateway. If I were you, I’d call in to T mobile, ask for a call back, and see what they have to say could be causing this.

I have had periods when the T-Mobile/Nokia 5G gateway connection runs slower & this past month have experienced repeated, random, frequent tower signal drops. I have repeatedly made trouble calls with T-Mobile support and provided lots of information. The conversations finally did come around to work being done on the tower where upgrades were being made. For me I went through the GW relocation process to try to improve the signal. I found a site waveform.com which is a vendor that sells external MIMO antennas that are compatible with the Nokia 5G router/gateway. The information was interesting & helpful to me to improve my connections to the tower. I discovered that the internal design of the router has the antennas in a vertical orientation all the way around the router. Think of it as an 8 sided device. There are multiple “5G” and WIFI radios. What I found most interesting was the rotation of the gateway in order to improve signal. From my extensive testing with rotation of the device I found the best 5G or LTE signal wash over the can from the tower is a little tricky to work out. It appears to me the antenna to the left of the back of the device is the 5G antenna & the one to the right of the back of the router is the 4G LTE antenna. I have not confirmed this 100% but if I direct the back of the can northward to the tower line of sight 5 miles away the signal strength of the 5G and LTE are a little reduced. If I rotate the back of the can to allow the 5G signal to improve a bar then the LTE signal usually drops a bar. Well, my preference is to favor the 5G as latency is lower and speed capability is higher. Keep in mind as you read the dBm values for the tower signals that they are negative values and lower is better than higher. Signal strength is NOT the only value to understand. The signal quality is also important. If the signal quality is good or excellent as well as a strong signal then this will help improve the traffic to/through the gateway. The values for RSRP, signal strength, and RSRQ signal quality can help you “tune” in the signals once you understand them. The SNR or SINR, signal to noise db value is good to understand as well as it is listed as a positive value vs a negative value. Anything in the 10-12.5 is good and above 12.5 is excellent. If you have a strong signal but it has poor quality well this is not a good equation. I did a great deal of research and reading to be able to work through this. You can search online and find information to read that explains all this in detail. The end result I came to is that if you are on the outer limit of the tower signal but still have a fairly strong signal with good quality then an external MIMO antenna can make the difference to really improve the communication. The external MIMO antennas run ~$200 and waveform.com has a guide that very clearly explains how to add an external antenna to the gateway. It is a good option for people on the edge in a rural area like I am in. With the T-Mobile push to roll out 5G they have been working on the towers & equipment so even with an external antenna maintenance work on the towers can still cause, and do, cause disruptions. The web interface to manage the device is, in my opinion, a bit flakey at best. With a direct CAT6 cable connected to the device on LAN1 or LAN2 that is the best solution but I still see it a bit flakey and the advanced features listed on the documents are just not there. I have the software version 
1.2003.03.0178 in operation on the gateway & there are still limited options and no parental controls or QOS or MAC address handling etc… It is just a very dumbed down interface that is not mature yet or T-Mobile is not actually interested in providing the features yet as they have their hands full with the bigger roll out picture. For me it is the only internet solution I have here. My tower connections ran stable and rock solid, for the most part from January-June and then in July it went flakey at random intervals. Now T-Mobile has improved the tower, it appears, and it is back to stable. Don’t just give up as there are ways to have improved signal and communication if you are persistent.

There are various ways to find the T-Mobile towers. The best confirmation I had was asking direct the coordinates for the tower from the support engineer on a call. I can see the tower, which I suspected was the one, and the T-Mobile support engineer was nice enough to verify that. It is important to know where the tower is, and more local router/gateway information to really isolate where the problem is. There are a number of variables to consider so if you have more than one client and a phone that is 5G as well then testing and figuring out why things are slow can be made easier with more points of reference. The router software interface shows you values but does not allow you much in the way of testing tools to verify with. From a couple of clients on the local LAN ping a couple of DNS servers, like 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 (google, quad9, cloud flare) and read latency. Using speedtest.net is helpful as well but if the signal goes up and down a bit the latency record from PINGs to DNS servers are a good reference. 

Sure, the metal screen would work just like a Faraday cage and knock out the signal. The screens on our windows are fiberglass so not an issue. Actually the router is sitting in a larger window the size of a 36” door with no screen at all so the signal comes through pretty well. Being 5.3 miles from the tower is not optimal but given it is line of sight and no obstructions is a significant bonus. I wish T-Mobile would actually build in a few trouble shooting tools in the HTML interface and improve it. With the current software the lack of advanced feature controls in the web software on a client PC/laptop is a distinct disadvantage. Third party tools are available but it would be helpful for T-Mobile support and customers to have a built in tool in the HTML software that runs some basic scripts to collect important statistics that would empower the support engineers with a collection of data that gives them answers they need about operation. It would improve customer satisfaction and help out T-Mobile support. 

With the secondary at -95 dBm it appears to have your RF in the “Mid Cell” for the signal. The primary is a bit of a weak signal but at least the secondary n71 is good. You might still try rotating the orientation of the router to influence the signal wash over the 5G antennas. I found the antenna orientation is an alternating pattern of the WIFI and 5G antennas. From the back side the 5G-1 is at 5 o’clock, 5G-2 is at 2 o’clock etc and the WIFI-1 is right at the back along with the LAN ports etc and WIFI-2 is at 3 o'clock along with the GPS and BT. WIFI-4 is at the front with 5G-2 at 2 o'clock. I discovered I could rotate the router to point the 5G-4 antenna at 7 o'clock toward the tower and improve the signal by several dBm. It is worth a little experimentation. See if you can get the coordinates of the towers where your signals originate. It will help you improve the placement possibly. Hopefully T-Mobile support has shared the actual location of the towers with you as it really does help to know. I am 5.3 miles line of sight of the tower that sends the 5G signal and I obtain speeds up to 153 Mb down and ~50 Mb up at times. It is more common to see 120 Mb down and 25-30 up but that is still not bad. Until I started really tinkering with placement I did not get the signals optimized. It also really helps if T-Mobile is not working on the tower equipment. For me that did account for some of the disruptions. You sound like you are aware of the signal values but here is a handy table I found that you might find useful to have about.

With the secondary at -95 dBm it appears to have your RF in the “Mid Cell” for the signal. The primary is a bit of a weak signal but at least the secondary n71 is good. You might still try rotating the orientation of the router to influence the signal wash over the 5G antennas. I found the antenna orientation is an alternating pattern of the WIFI and 5G antennas. From the back side the 5G-1 is at 5 o’clock, 5G-2 is at 2 o’clock etc and the WIFI-1 is right at the back along with the LAN ports etc and WIFI-2 is at 3 o'clock along with the GPS and BT. WIFI-4 is at the front with 5G-2 at 2 o'clock. I discovered I could rotate the router to point the 5G-4 antenna at 7 o'clock toward the tower and improve the signal by several dBm. It is worth a little experimentation. See if you can get the coordinates of the towers where your signals originate. It will help you improve the placement possibly. Hopefully T-Mobile support has shared the actual location of the towers with you as it really does help to know. I am 5.3 miles line of sight of the tower that sends the 5G signal and I obtain speeds up to 153 Mb down and ~50 Mb up at times. It is more common to see 120 Mb down and 25-30 up but that is still not bad. Until I started really tinkering with placement I did not get the signals optimized. It also really helps if T-Mobile is not working on the tower equipment. For me that did account for some of the disruptions. You sound like you are aware of the signal values but here is a handy table I found that you might find useful to have about.

 

Thank you for your reply.

Sorry for the poor discription of my issue.  I was a bit concerned I may have run to many details together clouding what I was trying to convey.  My issue is with the replacement gateway I received about 4 weeks ago.  The secondary (5G) signal is weak.  What I currently have right now is: 

Primary (B66):  RSRP: -106 dBm, SNR: 13 dB, RSRQ: -11 dB.

Secondary (n71):  RSRP: -112 dBm, SNR: -1 dB, RSRQ: -14.

I have rotated the gateway a full 360 degrees looking for the best signal strength as well as the best quality.  I’ve tried to favor SNR and RSRQ over RSRP.  What I posted above is the best I can find.  Oddly, I get the same reading with the front of the Can at 0 degrees facing the tower and at 90 degrees (3 o’clock) to the tower.

As I stated, this is a replacement gateway.  The first gateway had better secondary signal performance (-95 dBm).  The 5G signal (n71) is a 600 MHz signal and I would think should perform better (penetration and range) than what I’m seeing with this replacement gateway.

I can’t get a good 5G signal regardless of where I go in the house and how I rotate the Can.   As a result, the speeds have dropped off significantly.  And, to make it even more frustrating, occationally the speeds will come back up to close to what I had back in May, June, and then drop back down again.  And then there is the occational signal drop, sometimes the secondary, other times both requiring a reboot to re-establish a connection.

This is why I’m thinking I may have a faulty gateway that is not performing as it should. 

Hum… sounds as if there are significant obstructions for the signal delivery to the router from the tower. I agree that the penetration and range 600 MHz signal should have a pretty solid range out to ~10 miles without obstructions and line of sight. With the RSRQ on the secondary signal at -14 the signal quality is degraded. There could be significant obstructions for the signal delivery to the router. I considered a MIMO external antenna to boost the signal reception here and reduce the limitations of the router placement. Being 5.3 miles from the 5G tower puts us in the mid range but that is not bad here. The design of the “can” style router may not be good for some solutions. If you have a 5G phone when the router drops the n71 channel check and see if the phone sees 5G or not. When calling T-Mobile support I discovered they had other complaints that related to that tower. They did work on the equipment on the tower and the signal drops have not been a major issue since. I did suspect this router or the software upgrade that it took but after the work on the tower equipment operations improved back to the 5 month period prior to the month of chaos. I investigated the possibility of heat related influence and even put the router outside on a day when it was 88 degrees and it did not have any issue or have any over temp alarms. If it does have temperature problems it should provide the alarm when the LED menu panel on top of the router is used. Unfortunately the software interface via the web has no temperature reporting.

If you are interested go to waveform.com and to their hotspot guides and check out the “T-Mobile High Speed 5G Internet Gateway External Antenna Guide” According to waveform improving signal quality is the best way to improve data rates. If the signal is cleaned up the data rates should improve as there would be fewer retransmissions due to packet damage. Their guide is fairly informative and is worth the time to read. They provide free shipping for orders over $100 and “Easy Returns” with satisfaction guaranteed. I have not confirmed all that but I have been considering the external MIMO antenna as placement of the router in the bathroom window on the NE corner of the house is not very convenient plus the moisture would probably not be good for the router either. Sending the WIFI signal across the length of the house also makes it a less attractive solution. I am thinking the external antenna is a better option for me as the 802.11ax from the Nokia router is actually working fairly well. The choke point will always be the signal to the tower. 

Can’t you just do a reboot, rather than a factory reset?

That way, you don’t lose your configuration.

The 4G LTE signals, in theory, can cover many miles but as you get farther away from the tower the speed drops off. The 5G NR channels can reach out but the n41 does not reach out as far as the n71 signals as the wave lengths are not the same. The n41 is a higher frequency than the n71 and the n41 does not have the penetration that the longer n71 has. 

You provided this as signal data:

Primary (B66):  RSRP: -106 dBm, SNR: 13 dB, RSRQ: -11 dB.

Secondary (n71):  RSRP: -112 dBm, SNR: -1 dB, RSRQ: -14.

So, we know it is a n71 5G NR signal on the secondary and 4G LTE on the primary signaling. We can also tell the signal strength on either is NOT stellar. If the SNR on the n71 is as stated that is very poor signal to noise ratio. The combination of barely fair signal and poor SNR does not fare well. It is not promising. If the tower is line of sight and no obstructions an external antenna could help some but I am not sure if it would be sufficient to compensate for the weak signals. It looks to me as if the tower is just too far away for a solid signal. Tower location and distance to the tower is important.

I would guess the gateway took an update and now the web interface no longer provides the “admin” access. If you have one of the newer T-mobile gateways i.e. post Nokia gateway, the newer ones require the use of the mobile application on your phone to have admin access. Only the Nokia gateway still provides the HTML interface with administrative access. I can only speculate that T-Mobile development decided to streamline the development efforts to the mobile application to save money. The development of the Nokia gateway software is not where the focus is as they moved on to the other two gateways for newer deployments. It is what it is. I prefer the management via the HTML interface and have the Nokia gateway. Once in a while I will use the mobile application but still the web management option would hands down always be my preference. Since you can only access the management from the local network via wi-fi it would make sense to me however development costs are probably the driving factors.