Unable to use T-Mobile Home Internet with work VPN, any suggestions?

@Althius your predicament is a mandate from your employer. You might give TM Home Internet customer service a call and ask them if they have any software solutions for your workplace requirement. Or, ask them to pay for the acceptable service they require (employer requirements are usually paid for by the employer). 

I hope this helps. 

This exact same thing happened to me out of nowhere today; I’ve had everything working flawlessly since I switched to tmobile over a month ago from xfinity and now it will not accept my work’s vpn. I will cancel my service immediately if this cannot be fixed; this can cost me my job.

Wanted to post an update. Unfortunately, earlier today, my VPN issues returned. I have no idea what happened. I have tried everything I can think of and have even lowered my MTU size to the lowest setting and am still not able to connect to most apps while on my VPN. I apologize if you try my solution and it doesn’t work for you. Was working perfectly at 1450 MTU until midday today. Hoping it’s just an intermittent thing, but still wanted to post here. 

No doubt T-Mobile reads these threads and fixed it so that you can't use VPN. I too was taken a back by this inability to access VPN, rendering working from home - something that 80  percent of the work force is doing these days shocking.  Ill give you in non technical terms what was explained to me..as to why they don't allow it...the towers can't handle that amount of traffic or data moving through the air ..or some garbage along those lines.  I live in a rural area. The closest tower is less the two miles away and the signal to my house sucks. The plan offered to me originally for switching was then retracted and I was told that plan isn't offered in my area. So the cost for service doubled and the data speed became limited.  And then to find out no VPN?  Not a happy camper. I've been a t mobile cell phone user for 12 years and stuck with them while they got their together. Customer service has always been very good. But this experience of being misled and misinformed  has really soured me.  Great concept - but poor execution and would not recommend their home Internet.   

I can’t believe T-Mobile support just flat out told me that their internet service is incompatible with a VPN! How can they advertise that I can use this for work at home with multiple high speed streams, but just conveniently neglect to let me know I can’t use a VPN! No suggestions for solutions, he just offered to cancel my service immediately!

@AJ1234 My wife and I use company VPNs and they seemed to stop working the weekend of Jan 20, 2024. Is that when you started having problems?

My Ring cameras seemed to have stopped communicating with the mother ship, but Alexa appears to be up and running. I was already using the 2.4GHz band, but I didn’t check the WPA settings. I’ll try again next time I’m up there.

I’m in a rural area (Pine, AZ) and their aren’t many options, so fixing this is critical for us to WFH. My VPN connected fine (more-or-less) to company resources, but I couldn’t get to Google Drive. My wife’s VPN had troubles using Teams and couldn’t connect to a cloud app (website) she relies on.

Frustrating. 100% agree with @Homerthefox that it’s deceptive to market this as broadband alternative when so many people rely on WFH.

Been using TM 5g home internet for work for the past few months. Logged out last Friday without any issues to speak of. On Monday morning, my services were inop. My work computer showed connected, as did the TM app. After a few days of speaking with my companies IT dept, they informed me the issue is with my ISP. I called TM tech support to see if they had any information to provide. The tech i spoke with was super nice and sounded knowledgeable. He said as of Monday they’d started receiving an influx of calls with this exact issue. He said they are working on a solution, but could not provide a timeline. In the meantime, I’m completely unable to work. If TM cannot get this fiugred out in the next 48 hours, I’ll be forced to switch providers.

All of this is really unfortunate because I’ve been a champion of TM 5G. I now look like a donkey to the folks I’ve been telling all these great things. Fingers crossed they come through.

THANK YOU!!! My company uses the same VPN and it worked perfectly until Monday, 1/22, probably the same change you experienced. I followed your guidance and it works perfectly. I’m back to the same full speed I had previously, maybe even faster, and now I have a second home network dedicated to work from home. 

Same. 

Ive called in twice trying to get some kind of resolution and in both cases were told I should try contacting my works help desk.…

Will be spending my weekend shopping new ISPs I guess.

I tried that last Friday (Jan 19) and it still didn’t work. I’ve picked up a new LTE router from a local vendor, it works good at my home in Scottsdale, no VPN issues. Will be trying it out in Pine tomorrow. It’s got an AT&T SIM. The router is a Cudy AC1200 if anyone is interested. It’s 4G, but I don’t think I was getting true 5G speeds from TMobile anyway.

My wife and I need to do video conferencing, and we watch streaming content on just one Roku TV, so we really don’t need a ton of bandwidth.

Also, I have an Ambient Weather station, and it has never connected with the TMHI. It only works on a 2.4GHz WIFI band, and as you probably know, the TMHI will only broadcast on EITHER 2.4 or 5GHz, not both like most home routers. Even on the 2.4GHz band, it wouldn’t recognize the internet from the TMobile cellular network.

I have a very short window to return the LTE router if I want to go back to TMobile. But even if TM gets things fixed up by tomorrow, they may have already lost my trust. As many have said… VPN is critical for my wife and I to work from home. It’s non-negotiable.

I’m glad I’m not alone in this boat. For me, this started Friday morning 0830 19Jan2024. I have used this service with Cisco Anyconnect and a Meraki z3 for over a year and a half. I have been a Tmobile home internet customer for over 2 years.  Its pretty much my only option. 

If you’re told by T mobile to call your company’s help desk. You can, but they’ll be stumped, all the way up to the network engineers.

For context, I’m Tier 2 Help Desk for a hospital network with 25,000 users and I’ve used Tmobile home internet exclusively for over a year and a half.  

I started having this problem on 19Jan as I use a Meraki Z3 to connect to my work network, with Cisco Anyconnect as a backup VPN.  I know there are threads 2 years old about Tmobile having issues with the Meraki but I personally have not. And I had used it for a year and a half with rarely a hick-up. Everything came to a screeching halt at about 0830 Friday morning.  I excused myself from my job to power cycle my devices, thinking Tmobile was slow and power cycle to a new IP. No dice. I lost ALL Meraki connection. Yet the Meraki light showed it was connected.  I switched over to my home wifi and connected to Cisco Anyconnect, but the connection was slow. Roughly 10/2 as opposed to 60/10 outside of VPN. I disconnected from wifi and plugged a direct network cable in. NO connection. I overnighted a network cable from Amazon (I needed a 20 ft). Still NOTHING with a wired connection.  

I then placed a warranty claim on my gateway as it was the old 4g white router. Tmobile overnighted a Nokia (trashcan) 5g router.  STILL no wired connection.  And slow wifi with VPN. By this time I had researched reddit and forums and all were coming down to the conclusion with IPv4  vs IPv6 address conflicts. 100% on Tmobile’s side.  But no one at their help desk knew what the heck I was talking about. If I could see their faces, they would probably look at me like I was crazy. I broke out knowledge and experience, and I was shut down like I was speaking a foreign language. 

The guru on my ITS network team in charge of the Meraki Z3 routers mentioned that send and receive are being sent on entirely different ports and the ‘receive’ ports are changing, leading to time outs and bad connections. 

This also affects security cameras like Ring and VOIP phone services.  This will affect a lot of work from home people that talk on a virtual phone like Cisco Jabber or a Cisco IP desk phone.  

This is a SERIOUS issue that is going to drive a lot of people to change service as they can no longer use it for a TRUSTED work from home internet connection.  I do hope T mobile scrapes these forums for ideas and user feedback. If not, a lot of people are going to find alternatives; or lose their jobs. 

Personally, like others; I will be spending the weekend searching for another work alternative. My only other option is US Cellular’s home internet. And I’m not impressed with their ping times. If ping times are like my phone (150ms), it won’t even do a Zoom meeting. 

Tmobile was the golden goose that allowed me to live my rural country life while still having a taste of modern internet.  This is no longer the case when it comes to my job security. 

This is old knowledge and he has since reported it didn’t work after 45 minutes. Just saving people time. 

If their intention is to crack down on individuals that abuse their network, blanket banning VPNs isn’t the solution. Example; My work VPN uses about 18gb a month. I, on the other hand with streaming services, downloading games on steam, 4k youtube; I use WAY more data than my work allotment does. I think I hit 900gb one month because a gaming hard drive failed and I had to redownload everything. But if my VPN doesn’t handshake properly, its slapped in the face and denied. 

IMO, this was a bad business choice to eliminate VPNS, to avoid IPv4 support and provide even more of a worse tech support.  I work tier 2 tech support. Every time I call tmobile, they seem like nice people, but the tech part of the interview was waved.