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

  • 20 September 2021
  • 29 replies
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J
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My t-mobile internet, especially lately, has been the worst internet I have ever bought/dealt with. My wife with her iPhone 12 Pro gets medium 5g coverage most of the time at our house. Why does our home internet modem averages weak to poor signal? I’ve never gotten a better signal than weak. It is also CONSTANTLY losing connection to the internet witch is hard on my wife when she works from home full time and is constantly dropping connection to her work. I’m never getting the minimum download speed I was told I would at least be getting and streaming and or gaming is virtually impossible. Please help or I’m going to have to cancel and go back to our previous internet provider. 

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Best answer by 007BondMI6 20 September 2021, 19:19

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29 replies

1
Userlevel 1

I’m curious to see your answers.  I have experienced the same over the last month.  We’ve had the home internet box for months, and it worked wonders over my old provider.  So much so, we were able to start using a streaming tv service.  But not now.  The download speed has dropped tremendously and at times it will just disconnect entirely.  Not just with the streaming service, it does it with a phone or a tablet as well.  Never did that before, and nothing has changed.  I have gone through the reset process, the unplugging and so forth, and the problem remains.  I guess that unlimited data isn’t so unlimited after all.

Just don’t know what to do about it.  

1
Userlevel 1

007Bond, how would I go about seeing what bands I’m connected to?  I’m not a techie and don’t know a lot about this.  The tower, however, is right next door to me.  Less than 200 yards away.  I’d like to do more than vent.  I’m not real keen on calling support and being on the phone for 30 minutes for them to tell me to unplug it and plug it back in, but I guess whatever I have to do.  If anybody here can offer advice let me know what info you need.  I’m just frustrated that for almost 6 months it worked flawlessly, now my download speed and connectivity won’t last longer than 10 minutes of streaming tv.  Something has changed and it’s nothing that I have done.  Thanks for whatever help you can offer.   

P

I have been fighting TMobile for a month now. I've had an example of my gateway, a 4g version sent out, multiple tickets, nobody can do anything about. It has been the most frustrating experience I've ever had. We went from 175mb down / 4mb up to barely 7-8 down, sometimes nothing. We both work from home and I have sometimes to drive away with the gateway to get to another tower so I can work. Customer service has been clueless and I have already signed up for another service. I am beyond annoyed at this point.

E

I’m curious to see your answers.  I have experienced the same over the last month.  We’ve had the home internet box for months, and it worked wonders over my old provider.  So much so, we were able to start using a streaming tv service.  But not now.  The download speed has dropped tremendously and at times it will just disconnect entirely.  Not just with the streaming service, it does it with a phone or a tablet as well.  Never did that before, and nothing has changed.  I have gone through the reset process, the unplugging and so forth, and the problem remains.  I guess that unlimited data isn’t so unlimited after all.

Just don’t know what to do about it.  

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

0
Userlevel 5
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Log into the gateway (forget the app useless) open a web browser go to http://192.168.12.1/ primary and secondary signal info off the Overview first tab. Then Status tab and same primary and secondary info. You have to expand them with click the down arrow to see the data.

 

This is the data that shows your connection.

J
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007Bond, how would I go about seeing what bands I’m connected to?  I’m not a techie and don’t know a lot about this.  The tower, however, is right next door to me.  Less than 200 yards away.  I’d like to do more than vent.  I’m not real keen on calling support and being on the phone for 30 minutes for them to tell me to unplug it and plug it back in, but I guess whatever I have to do.  If anybody here can offer advice let me know what info you need.  I’m just frustrated that for almost 6 months it worked flawlessly, now my download speed and connectivity won’t last longer than 10 minutes of streaming tv.  Something has changed and it’s nothing that I have done.  Thanks for whatever help you can offer.   

Quite literally the same thing happens to me.

J

I was getting right at 100 MBps for the 2 weeks I held on to my old ISP, the day after I dropped my other provider I’ve been getting like ~45 at best (with no movement on the router etc)

 

Here’s my connection information:

Primary Signal
PCI
248
Band
B2
EARFCN
677
Secondary Signal
PCI
625
Band
n71
NR-ARFCN
126490
 
Any thoughts?
S
Userlevel 2
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I was getting right at 100 MBps for the 2 weeks I held on to my old ISP, the day after I dropped my other provider I’ve been getting like ~45 at best (with no movement on the router etc)

 

Here’s my connection information:

Primary Signal
PCI
248
Band
B2
EARFCN
677
Secondary Signal
PCI
625
Band
n71
NR-ARFCN
126490
 
Any thoughts?

I’ve had essentially the same experience. T-Mobile has essentially oversold their 5G home service that went from strong in the Spring to non-functional by August. Now they just claim they are congested and have no intention of expanding their capacity to meet the demand they sold. They say speeds of less than 10, or even 1, out of the 150 they promised, are fine during normal waking hours, and if you don’t like it you can leave. Pretty sure that’s call theft and fraud. 

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

1
Userlevel 1

Thanks.  I’ll follow up on that when I get home.  I appreciate your time.  

S
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My god I’m not the only one then? I’m going to post my details too if any of you want to help me figure it out because after a month of ridiculous speeds (0.12-0.3mbps) from 9 am to 10 pm, 2 engineering tickets, multiple 5G High speed gateway router exchanges (I’m on my third one!) I’m literally about to give up on t-mobile home internet and look for spectrum - this hasn’t been an issue prior on the 4G LTE gateway (apart from needing an Eero Mesh to connect >6 devices that is). Isn’t 5G WIFI gateway meant to be better!? 

D
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@hank has some good stuff about boosting your signal, but my router reports very good signal and it worked great for the first few weeks...  now pretty much unusable.  have they pushed out a bad firmware update or something????

A

I’m curious to see your answers.  I have experienced the same over the last month.  We’ve had the home internet box for months, and it worked wonders over my old provider.  So much so, we were able to start using a streaming tv service.  But not now.  The download speed has dropped tremendously and at times it will just disconnect entirely.  Not just with the streaming service, it does it with a phone or a tablet as well.  Never did that before, and nothing has changed.  I have gone through the reset process, the unplugging and so forth, and the problem remains.  I guess that unlimited data isn’t so unlimited after all.

Just don’t know what to do about it.  

I have the same problems. Thinking about going back to Comcast.

C
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Turn off all the broadcast SSIDs! Then buy a wifi6 home mesh network. Sad you got to spend money but the built in wifi6 modem is 🔥🔥 hot  garbage 🔥🔥🔥.

 

Then, flip it over and take the battery out of it, lots of great videos on tear downs on YouTube. Takes 5 min. 

Once back together, buy a cheap 120mm fan with usb-C connector  , one with feet on it  and set the modem on top and plug it in to provided USB C port.

 

The short of it is the modem is overheating during use , and going into thermal throttle..lots of videos showing temps with a FLIR camera proving so.

If you do that small mod, cost maybe $10 for a fan for it (should of been built with one TMO) , and it still doesn't stabilize your service then I suggest factory resetting it and again switching off all Wi-Fi broadcast SSIDs. 

 

Get a nice mesh WiFi 6 system like a Tp Link Deco , plug it in and your worries are done. Also, sadly Bars, don't really equal signal strength or quality. It's really a horrible indicator that's flawed on all cell devices.

 

If you do ALL the above, and it still doesn't get the speeds you want, then I suggest as a last resort download cellmapper , find your tower and get it in /near a window as close to the tower as possible.

Antenna placement is also 🔥 garbage 🔥 on these and many techies like to mod them with external connectors for amplified or High Gain Directional Antennas.  Again also cheap and fairly easy if you can follow directions. 

 

The last step is for people like me who want the most out of the network. Likely if you do all I say here, and your firmware is UTD,  and you still cannot get usable service I suggest returning it for a replacement and or refund.

 

The kinks will get ironed out and TMobile is great about listening to their customers and giving them what they want/need . 

I am sure they will have someone who is engineering the next modem iteration take all the above into account.be patient and I'll be here to help if you need it 

L

My t-mobile internet, especially lately, has been the worst internet I have ever bought/dealt with. My wife with her iPhone 12 Pro gets medium 5g coverage most of the time at our house. Why does our home internet modem averages weak to poor signal? I’ve never gotten a better signal than weak. It is also CONSTANTLY losing connection to the internet witch is hard on my wife when she works from home full time and is constantly dropping connection to her work. I’m never getting the minimum download speed I was told I would at least be getting and streaming and or gaming is virtually impossible. Please help or I’m going to have to cancel and go back to our previous internet provider. 

 

Exactly what information in this post proves to provide 'The Solution' as its flagged 'Resolved'... other than to guide you through web access to the gateway data?

E

My t-mobile internet, especially lately, has been the worst internet I have ever bought/dealt with. My wife with her iPhone 12 Pro gets medium 5g coverage most of the time at our house. Why does our home internet modem averages weak to poor signal? I’ve never gotten a better signal than weak. It is also CONSTANTLY losing connection to the internet witch is hard on my wife when she works from home full time and is constantly dropping connection to her work. I’m never getting the minimum download speed I was told I would at least be getting and streaming and or gaming is virtually impossible. Please help or I’m going to have to cancel and go back to our previous internet provider. 

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

0
Userlevel 5
Badge +5

Anyone with issues you should post what bands you are connected to, RSRP, SNR, RSRQ, RSSI, how far are you from the tower, if you want anyone to help you. If you just want to vent ok you have vented but if you want help post some info that a person helping you can use.

Just saying my internet drops ok so happens with cable, fios, nothing new here. My speed is slow ok happen to me with Comcast too again noting of use to help you.

 

 

 

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
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This JUST happened to me starting Monday of this week…. I WAS connected to the T-Mobile tower (was Sprint) only 1 mile away and getting VERY high speeds then it disappears Monday….  They are converting Sprint towers over right now and I am currently connected to a tower over 10 miles away…. for the time being……. you need to run Speedtest (app on your phone) and AS it starts to run the download test and the meter arrow starts to move start to rotate your gateway and see if it starts to ‘jump’ in speed….. run it several times and do this over and over….  it has 4 antennas inside and rotation affects where it is looking outside….. also try unplugging it and while it on try moving it to different locations in your house and you need to test next to various windows each time…. there is a small display at the top of the unit and to activate it just tap on it lightly and you may have to swipe it left or right a couple of times to find the connection strength ‘bars’ ….they are very bright and may be a bit hard to see…..  at each location you can slowly rotate (like ¼ turn at a time) and see what you get…. once you think you have found a better spot plug it in and wait about a minute or so for it to come back on and after another 2 minutes let it finish up connecting and THEN redo your speed test(s) ….. If you happen to have an upstairs then by all means locate it up there…..  there ARE kits available online from a company called Waveform that well let you add an external high gain set of antennas to the unit and you can then pull in signals many miles away….. works very well by the way….. and there are videos on YouTube these days about that...

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]

J
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Log into the gateway (forget the app useless) open a web browser go to http://192.168.12.1/ primary and secondary signal info off the Overview first tab. Then Status tab and same primary and secondary info. You have to expand them with click the down arrow to see the data.

 

This is the data that shows your connection.

Thank you for this info, I too will also look up and follow up with more helpful information. 

M

If you’ve tried T-MOBILE support and have gotten nowhere…..

Understand first and foremost, if your signal is low, your 5G service will be poor. We engineer types call this “garbage in gets you garbage out.”

Now regarding the T-MOBILE internet equipment on the towers, it operates on what T-MOBILE calls 5G-UC, which is basically a “mid-band” frequency that carries a lot of bandwidth but is not as fast as “high band.” But frankly, for home internet mid-band is all you need. I have learned in my area that the tower equipment for HOME INTERNET is not the same as is used for mobile phone service, and that T-MOBILE does not over-subscribe the service. This means if you get good signal, you’ll get great performance.

After signal improvements I commonly get greater than the rated bandwidth for the service except during peak TV viewing time (when everyone is streaming). During peak times, I get near 90% of the rated bandwidth of 115Mbps down and 23Mbps up. This is tremendously better than the local yo-yo ISP provider in my area.

The simple solution is to get a 5G cell signal booster, is good for metro and suburban applications, but not good for rural applications. Here is a company that sells several, but you may be able to get one from T-Mobile customer service for free, see https://www.surecall.com/signal-booster/cat/home-office/?GA_network=s&GA_device=c&GA_campaign=359540784&GA_adgroup=1316116102395667&GA_target=&GA_placement=&GA_creative=&GA_extension=8177657646064&GA_keyword=surecall%20flare&GA_loc_physical_ms=73538&GA_landingpage=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.surecall.com%2Fsignal-booster%2Fcat%2Fhome-office%2F&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=359540784&utm_keyword=surecall%20flare&msclkid=63d026ddde731514e44d44d7383784ef&utm_term=surecall%20flare&utm_content=Surecall%20Flare

For rural users, it gets more difficult, read on:

I live on lakefront property and had similar issues with both T-Mobile internet and digital TV reception issues. The root cause is simple; signal interference from a line of trees. Signal would get worse during spring and summer, and would improve during colder months, likely due to less tree leaves “attenuating,” aka reducing the signal quality. The solution was two fold: an antenna mast that I mounted to the back of my home that helped me realize 30 feet elevation, and 2: an outdoor antenna system for the T-Mobile device / high gain antenna for my Tivo DTV receiver. The antenna mast is heavy duty and designed for rural applications. The antenna mast was purchased from Amazon, see https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Up-Telescoping-Mast-TM-50-U-95/dp/B010GAQ3K4/ref=sxin_15_ac_d_rm?ac_md=3-2-YW50ZW5uYSB0b3dlcg%3D%3D-ac_d_rm_rm_rm&crid=1ZRVF69Y6MB43&cv_ct_cx=antenna+mast&keywords=antenna+mast&pd_rd_i=B010GAQ3K4&pd_rd_r=2f058b48-bce3-4b8a-84cd-f75aeef0bcd5&pd_rd_w=wAMTe&pd_rd_wg=L1ZHs&pf_rd_p=5fdda09e-d732-41f0-8362-9e3e115c3771&pf_rd_r=TF9FQV9FBB671GTZX44A&psc=1&qid=1644881211&sprefix=antenna+ma%2Caps%2C270&sr=1-3-12d4272d-8adb-4121-8624-135149aa9081, the antenna system for the T-Mobile device, see https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway/ , and instructions from

Mind you, this is a technical video. Get someone technical to help you if it is beyond your skills. For DTV, I purchased this monster antenna and mounted it to the same antenna mast  3 feet above the 5G antenna, see : https://www.amazon.com/pingbingding-Antenna-Outdoor-Amplified-Mounting/dp/B07DGYGGSF/ref=sr_1_15?keywords=150+mile+range+tv+antenna&qid=1644881882&sr=8-15 .

In closing, I hope I have brought to this discussion some information to help those in need.

 

-Hank

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.

B

Same here only diff I've had for 6months never had  over 4to5 mb but I was told b4 I joined we'd get 300mb tech on phone says it's at 75 somethings not right for last month if the signal on its own goes from 2bars to 1 then none I have to every 5min move it like a centimeter to grab atleast 2 bars but again and again it keeps dropping now it only says the router isn't using the 2.4ghz as it's main now just the 5ghz an 2.4 does show up I've tried every window every inch of my house we moved out to country so we go from fios and 500mg to the only internet we could get was crappy 500k dial up from century link till t-mobile should I ask for the square 5g router? I just ordered netgear wifi boost an extender my info only shows LTE

 

RSSI.         -75

BAND.      20M

CID.          7

CGI.             31026015235073

RSRQ.      -20

BAND.         B66

TAC.        31612

S
Userlevel 2
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I’ve had essentially the same experience. T-Mobile has essentially oversold their 5G home service that went from strong in the Spring to non-functional by August. Now they just claim they are congested and have no intention of expanding their capacity to meet the demand they sold. They say speeds of less than 10, or even 1, out of the 150 they promised, are fine during normal waking hours, and if you don’t like it you can leave. Pretty sure that’s call theft and fraud. 

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