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t-monile home internet is barely providing basic data speeds sometimds.

  • 20 September 2021
  • 29 replies
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29 replies

E

I’ve been dealing with download speeds of 1mbps to 3mbps since April 2022. before that we had 130mbps on download speeds for at least 2 years. Then they say there working on towers. The tower that we had good download speeds with was 6 miles away. Now they are tagging off At&T tower which is a half mile from us. Almost a year later and they still do not have it fixed. One day we had thought they fixed the problem, back up to 130mbps download. that lasted for a few hours. I have over 100 hours logged with tech support. SMH

R

T-Mobile’s home Internet service sucks, as does its fake 5G service (really just relabeled 4G LTE).

There’s really not much point in checking radio frequency bands, connection strength, and so on. The proof is in the pudding: on weekends and late at night, I get download speeds in the hundreds of Mbps. During business hours, 1-2 Mbps!

My suggestion is to return your gateway and choose a different provider. It’s a shame that so many people are wasting time troubleshooting a service that is nothing more than a false promise. The network capacity just isn’t there.

 

 

R

Another thought would be to buy a 5G or even 4G LTE modem (Netgear has a range of them, including battery-powered portable ones that are much smaller, more modern and offer better network performance than the generic gateway T-Mobile provides) and get a data-only SIM card. T-Mobile’s prepaid arm offers 50 GB for $50/month, not a lot but adequate for someone who doesn’t play online games, doesn’t stream TV shows all day, and just has basic Internet needs. (There was apparently a limited-time 100 GB for $50/month promotion, and those who have it can keep that rate. Let’s hope it comes back, or that prices fall and data caps rise with the market.)

If you go this route you are sure to get better speeds, not only due to the more capable hardware, but also because T-Mobile Home Internet has close to the lowest priority on the network.

For people who like to tinker (and since we, as users of a service as immature as T-Mobile Home Internet, have to spend so much time checking frequency bands and signal strength, moving the gateway, rebooting, calling support, etc., most of us are tinkerers by definition), I’d even recommend getting a 4G LTE (cheap) or 5G board from SixFab and using a Raspberry Pi. You’d end up with a very high-performance, secure, infinitely configurable cellular modem + WiFi router setup.

J

I’m seeing similar issues,  I get 200mbps for a while then it drops to 3-4 mbps, power cycling the modem (Arcadian) sometime get’s it back to 200.  It has got to the point where I have a smart plug on the modem so I can power cycle it from my phone.  I’m almost ready to start scripting the power cycle when the speed drops :-)

Here is a graph of the last 24hrs (speed test every 30 mins on both my primary T-Mobile Home Internet and backup AT&T Wireless Internet connections - policy based routing on pfSense to direct the speed test traffic)

 


I thought it might be falling back to 4g but bands are B2/N41 consistently with 4 bars each, the cell ID doesn’t change, SINR, RSRQ and RSSI are stable and don’t change when the speed drops.  Pixel and iPhone both get consistently good speeds with manual tests when wifi is disabled and they are on the cell directly).

All test on gigabit ethernet (not wifi) from a linux VM on ProxMox server running speedtest-cli.

TMHI tech did some sort of remote reset / re-provision and it hasn’t helped.  They have me scheduled for a call back in a week and if it hasn’t improved they want to swap out the modem.

[I’m software / network engineer, I work from home and my setup has a *lot* of monitoring]

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