T-mobile 5g home internet forcing to tower with no data issues/changing towers/bands

so its been about an hour since i last checked the gateway connection and now its back to b71 with no secondary.

Internet Connection

Primary Signal

Connected 

RSRP-100 dBm

SNR11 dB

RSRQ-15 dB

RSSI-72 dBm

Secondary Signal

Not Connected

RSRPNot Connected

SNRNot Connected

RSRQNot Connected

 i did manage to get a speedtest just now

 PING ms

966

 DOWNLOAD Mbps

0.23

 UPLOAD Mbps

0.00

obviously this is not good lol 

not really sure what the geeksquad would do dont they work for bestbuy ? lol 

well my second time typing this because t-mobile home internet wont even work good enough to post a responce and this is with primary and secondary connections.

i had read a 20 mins ago about someone unpluging the 5g gateway for 5 mins and there connections came back well i unplugged it and connecting back to a tower i have not been connected to in 10 days or so here are the readings.

Primary Signal b66

Connected

RSRP-117 dBm

SNR7 dB

RSRQ-14 dB

RSSI-88 dBm

Secondary Signal n71

Connected

RSRP-109 dBm

SNR4 dB

RSRQ-13 dB

you can see this is a pretty weak connection on the 4g especially.

after not getting this connection for so long and its really the first time i unplugged the device and not just turned it off with the power button im starting to thing it might be heat related or just a batterey or gateways issue possibly im not really sure.

anyways still having very bad connection and pages saying no internet or check dns settings when on this tower right now but at night i get a good connection without many issues when im getting this connection its really strange i do think i need to contact t-mobile 100% honestly i wish it was just able to be through emails with a real tech support engineer. as i dont feel like talking on the phone about this is kind of hard to convey everything when we could each just have a saved email document to go back and check through.

also there are no other options other than satellite or mobile hotspots for internet connection for me i have been using hotspots for internet for at least 5 years. no other mobile internet service offers a home internet solution for my address.

boostmobile was working good up until sprint merged with t-mobile then i lost all data connection basically. my 100gb also 100$ a month hotspot plan that was supposed to be prioritized and high bandwidth i was geting 50-80 mbps consistent then all of a sudden my ip is from t-mobile and not sprint and nothing worked anymore lol this was about  a year ago.

i have talked to boost mobile they say nothing is wrong on there end or with the towers and basically argued with me about there being a problem at all. this is why i dont want to have to call it takes a ton of time as well. i still have a 30$ phone plan and 4gb data or something its still useless will be canceling after like 8 years of service.-the problem is no one seems to have any reliable service around here the only one i haven't been on is at&t and it cost alot to keep trying this stuff out with no luck at all.

not sure if they need a firmware update or i just need a new device i think the battery pack might be a issue in these devices if its trying to charge a fully charged battery all the time its plugged in it seems like it could cause problems and idk the battery thing seems like a ridiculous idea anyways since it doesn't actually work when its unplugged from the wall just seems like something extra to go wrong and generate heat so im thinking its probably a thermal issue or just a defective device now after unplugging it for 5 mins made it connect to something i have not been able to connect to for 10 days. also i do have a fan mounted to it running 24/7 so this did not help the issue. 

update-so i really have not hardly been using this maybe every 2 days i check and see if i got any new connections or what band/towers its connecting to. almost always the same b71 with no secondary and basically this connection does not even work to load a webpage 99% of the time

Today i have connected to a new band/tower primary b26 

RSRP-115 dBm

SNR1 dB

RSRQ-14 dB

RSSI-87 dBm

no secondary lol as you can see these numbers are not fantastic and only gets speeds around 3-5 mbps i looked up the tower and its a sprint tower about a half a mile away.

So the odd this is even with this poor connection the web browsing is way more snappy no weird 2-10 seconds after you click on things something happens works like a proper connection ping is also 60-100 rather than 800-10000. i really wonder if this is because its a sprint tower lol

I wonder if you have to connect to primary and secondary bands on the same tower because there is 100% a 3 bar 5g band n71 that is a strong signal than this that this device just refuses to connect to regularly im not sure if its firmware or what but i just cant seem to get a secondary band for more than 1 day a week during the night hours.

i also noticed there is a huge cell phone tower i can see from the road that seems to be newer and less than a half a mile away i cant find it listed anywere to see what carriers are on it im really hoping i can get service through this tower soon.

So i guess its hopeful that i connected to a new tower and it works ok for web browsing and stuff so far cloudflare warp works and  phontonvpn seemed to have no trouble going through this tower not that i tried on the others though as i im just trying them out the last few days.

I more or less have the same issue and was also told 4Lte would be better. It was way worse.

I’m looking at ext or booster antenna as well as questioning why I dont have a secondary signal.

Also is there a better tower? 

They are mostly nice to deal with but I feel that we may not be getting the whole story.

Anybody have a hack to fix this?

@LPD155 Well that sucks to hear the lte gateway didnt help anything. I myself haven't even tried the my 5g device out today because its just to frustrating lol

I have been holding both the primary and secondary connections pretty steady for while not sure if the fan blowing in the bottom helped with that or not either way it doesnt really work during the day-it certainly seems like something t-mobile is doing on there end.

Im pretty sure i read somewhere that this home internet service  is the lowest priority service that is associated with t-mobile -meaning every other small offshoot cell phone brand like metro pcs and us mobile and a whole list of other small carriers get higher priority to the cell towers than t-mobile home internet users-this is outrageous to me-they offer a unlimited unthrottled service yet they make it so you cant actually use it a good portion of the time.

Hello thank you everyone for sharing there experience and i hope you all continue to give updates.

@LPD155 Im really curious that you say you weren't supposed to be on the 5 g device and that they recommend you roll back the 4g lte router-i was very surprised to see 5g in my area and its a pretty small area so i dont know how fast upgrades/updates would be coming around this area honestly ive had pretty good speeds on 4g myself 50-100 mbps and it was usually fairly stable so it would be really awesome if you could update back when you try it out- i think its pretty normal to be frustrated in situations when your constantly having issues with a service you pay for i too am having these feelings of frustration and im sure many more are as well.   

@justintyme2 Thats great to hear you are getting better service this past week-im hoping that they are just working on the towers in the area myself so im trying to be patient-i was actually on sprint a few years ago and it worked really good in my area then i switched to boost mobile that was on the sprint network-it worked really great up until…. the merger for some reason i never knew it was with t-mobile...my service has been horrible on that phone the past year although i read direct tv or dish network or something bought boost mobile so im not sure it was related to t-mobile-the ip comes up as t-mobile on speedtest this worries me because its been having really bad service for awhile now im hoping its not related to my current issues with home internet-i have pretty much all the same issues on this cell phone service hardly works

- the thing thats really weird is when sprint was involved i had full bars and great speeds/service on 4g i have heard recently t-mobile will be shutting off all the sprint towers this seems a bit crazy when some areas could have decent service using those towers and i worry the area im in wont be getting any upgrades for a long time im guessing ah well i guess im not sure exactly were i was going with that anymore Lol

So Saturday june 12th, i decided to try the router at 7 pm this normally doesnt work and i just switch back to my cell phone hotspot but it actually worked decently well good enough to watch hd streaming still would not work for gaming as the ping times just idk seem to be really terrible but it actually was functional and useable so thats a big step forward compared to previous attempts=0 connection basically maybe a webpage would load every 5 mins. 

I actually fell asleep with it streaming videos to my surprise it was still working when i woke up at 10 am i searched around and watched some random youtube videos-around 11 30 am i started getting alot of buffering and it did change towers/bands to b71 no secondary for a couple mins but went back to the other tower with b66 n71 bands connected still was buffering a lot at 480p so i switched back to my cell phone hotspot for the day-it does oddly seem to be getting slightly better everyday for some odd reason i feel like they got me on the nights and weekend plan by mistake lol 

Thanks again for sharing everyone please feel free to share/update/vent or give tips or ideas -i think it could help someone else possibly having problems and the more information thats out there the better in my opinion.

I just want to reply to this thread and update my own experience. Even though the router still has its own issues, my service has improved drastically this past week. It seems that they have or are in the process of upgrading the towers in my area. My phones and home internet have been connecting to several bands I've never seen before. My speeds are ranging from 15 mbs to 150mbs consistently, even when it's back on band 12. I was lucky to get 1mbs before. My cell phone was barely working (5g), my tablet (4g) seemed to be better. Our work cell phones (Sprint) have been horrible, even after the new sim cards and upgrading the phones. Whatever they are doing is starting to show improved service and speeds. The connection seems to be much more stable on all devices. I was really hating T-Mobile recently. I hope this continues and improves. I haven't returned my white LTE Gateway yet because the new router seemed so bad. I hooked it back up the other night and realized that most of my issues recently are the actual towers. How the High Speed Gateway is working so much better and improved from when I first got it. This doesn't fix everything and I'm hoping they continue to upgrade the firmware to allow us to change important settings. 

So just to update-I purchased a external router and shut off all the wifi on the t-mobile router and just ran the ethernet to the external router and used that for wifi i dont get any of the sent errors anymore that i was getting when using the wifi on the t-mobile router on the statistics section-still no internet during the day

again i have 0 connectivity today worked all night long after 10 pm getting about 40mbps download and .50 kbps upload...extremely slow upload in all cases so far and basically only a connection availible for 8 hours a night then they stop all the data from getting through like they flip a switch everything disconnects like xbox live/steam anything you were watching or loading at the time and doesnt come back till around 10 pm regardless of how many times you factory reset or move the device around

the device is staying connected to the primary and secondary pretty much the whole time now from what i can tell. 

 so to compare right now i have to use my visible cell phone mobile hotspot that has 1 bar of signal and just got a 3 mbps download and 1 mbps upload and 130 ping(at night this also works much better up to 30-40mbps) and its working 1000x better than the t-mobile home internet and even if its slow the ping doesnt ever go past 200-300 in a spike even when the t-mobile home internet is working at night there is a really strange delay in everything that i have never experienced on any internet connection not even dial up

i know this is harsh but dial up is actually going to give me a better gaming experience than the t-mobile home internet service im getting right now on dial up i had steady 250 ping t-mobile is seconds before your request even gets through-you click a webpage and you dont even know if your mouse click went threw or not it just hangs then 5 seconds later then page changes and starts loading you can also still web browse on dial up 24 hours  a day lol not just 8 hours a night.

so clearly some people are having pretty huge issues getting any connection at all and some people are upset about having 50 mbps and not 300 lol ive always had really poor internet and this is by far the worst experience ive ever had with just general web browsing - not to mention it will not hold a stable connection to any game even at night time.

i really hope it doesnt seem like im bashing this to hard i really want this to work out and i hope something is going to change but honestly im pretty broke right now and i was supposed to drop what i use currently for internet to pay for this but the t-mobile internet is not ready and honestly i feel like until i get 24 hours a day service i should not being paying 50$ a month for internet 8 hours a day that is limited to streaming movies and web browsing-no gaming usally wont even connect to steam so i cant even open the games without the connection.

im trying to put my experience out there and what i have tried/used myself so others can possibly make a more informed decision and also so i might get some help - sorry for the grammar as well lol ive wrote more in the last 3 days then i have in the last 5 years put together -Thanks

Cell phones get top priority once utilization reaches a certain threshold.  Don't know what that level is exactly, but home internet packets will get heavily queued when it happens (you can see the jitter factors go through the roof when it kicks in).  If it holds them long enough you risk timeouts depending on the application's tolerance for delayed packets.

Thus, the <usual> culprit is the congestion level.  Not necessarily for the wireless, but it can also be on the back haul as well.  A single tower can host multiple bands at the same location, all feeding into the same upstream pipeline.  Which can lead to a massive chokepoint under high utilization.

As a result, lately TMO seems to be wrangling with a capacity issue more so than coverage.

Might fair better if you can get them to put you on the 4g whitebox.  A lot of people seem to be having issues specific to those gray 5g units.

I am equidistant to several sites, and while I sometimes may notice a pause when it flips towers, it usually isn't bad enough to throw me out of stuff.

Keep in mind also that their 5g is NOT standalone... meaning you are still reliant on 4g even when using 5g (ie, can still be prone to the same congestion issues regardless).

Also note that this is the lower bands for 5g in most cases, not the higher mm wave option (average throughout throughout the day has been seen to be considerably less than a 100mbps difference in some cases).

In other words, some people are really only experiencing a dramatic difference when traffic is considerably lighter... during the day and other peak time frames they are performing pretty close to each other in overall throughput over time.

update-I did a factory reset and also added a computer fan on the bottom it does seem to be staying on the right bands now but i still am having very inconsistent well basically it consistently doesnt work lol.

i notice in the statistics im getting alot of sent errors ive tried changing the ssid and disabling it so im only on 2.4ghz or only on 5g or both most of the time i cant even load a webpage and had to resort to my phones mobile hotspot just to get on this page again.

the 5g router seems like its constantly dropping signals or something most of the time the error says connection interrupted or dns proxy errors. this is just working so bad i im not sure if my 5g silver router is even functional-its just weird that it works fine all night long but it doesnt work at all during the day it really seems like t-mobile is stopping the connection.

 the fan on the bottom made this thing run cool to the touch-it was very warm almost hot before the fan was added.

im not really sure what to say or do anymore im really frustrated at this point i should be getting a external router today to try and use a eithernet to the external router and run all my connections off of that this 5g router doesnt seem to be stable at all-how does it work at night but not during the day? this is ridiculous to me lol