Question

5G home internet keeps dropping

J
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I’m having a problem with T-Mobile 5g home internet that has not been resolved despite many calls in to the help line.  I’ve had T-Mobile 5g home internet for almost a month now, and the short version is that every so often the gateway drops the network.  When I say “drop the network,” I mean to say it throws everything off of the Wifi that it’s broadcasting, and anything plugged in via ethernet says “no network found.  (To elaborate this point, cell phones switch to cellular data because wifi is gone for them, and computers hardwired into the gateway think that they are no longer plugged into anything.)  Turning off the gateway and turning it back on resolves the issue, but doesn’t prevent it from happening again.  Whatever is happening doesn’t seem to affect our connection speed/strength when the gateway IS providing signal to devices in the home, but due to the nature of our work, we need a connection that won’t just disconnect randomly.  

 

To address this, T-mobile has so far run a bunch of tests on their end, and seem to have ruled out a tower issue (which makes sense, as the tower shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not the devices on the gateway’s wifi or ethernet connection get thrown off of the network.)  They’ve sent me a replacement gateway, which is experiencing the exact same problem (3 times in the last 36 hours, in fact).   I’ve noticed that the device gets pretty warm, so I set up a computer case fan as a cooler to force air through the device, thinking that perhaps it’s an issue with the device overheating.  However, while the gateway is notably cooler than it was without the fan, it has not prevented the issue from persisting.  The last thing that I can think to do (and my most recent attempt at resolving this issue) is to plug a router into the gateway via ethernet, and allow the router to handle the wifi/connections w/ devices in the house, and to disable wifi from the gateway all together.  Maybe the gateway is simply too overburdened with connections and gets somehow overwhelmed and shuts down, and having the router handle the “heavy lifting” of taking care of all of the individual device connections will resolve it?  I don’t have a great deal of faith that this will fix the issue (as the gateway also kicks ethernet things off of the network when it experiences this problem), but I’m running out of options/ideas of what to do in order to just get a stable, constant internet service.   

 

Is anybody else having this issue, has anybody resolved this issue, or does anybody have any advice or feedback regarding how I might get this resolved so that I can get back to having stable internet?

264 replies

iTinkeralot
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What are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

iTinkeralot
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You are probably right about the single tower. If you can get a picture of the tower and the radio configuration we could try to identify the equipment on the tower. In such a small farming community adding an additional tower does not seem like it would be an economic choice for T-Mobile unless they have leased space on the other tower and have a more economical solution. I would think they would leverage the existing tower space vs adding yet another tower.

W

What are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

For the primary, the PCI is ALWAYS 308, that’s the B66 tower. It never changes, the primary tower is by far the most consistent connection I have had. I can’t even recall a time it said I had no connection other than when I took the sim card out to try and cool it down. If I could even just disable the secondary tower I probably wouldn’t have drops at all, but that would sacrifice speed from n71.

It’s the secondary one that’s always flakey. As we have established, the cells on the second one occasionally change between the two. There’s no rhyme or rhythm between when it’s on one or the other.

In terms of the RSRP, RSRQ and SNR, the primary tower is stable unless it’s raining. Even then I don’t actually lose connection.

The secondary one shows quite a bit of noise. RSRQ is usually -14, and the RSRP ranges between -110 to -119, or dropping all together. SNR is usually 0, sometimes -2. Sometimes 1.

S

I had another thought or two about troubleshooting this. You have clients upon the ASUS and still have LAN 2 for leverage. The Roku test was informative but what about connecting a small gigabit switch to LAN 2 and using a client or two multi-homed in effect. You could use the investigation client(s) with wireless to the ASUS and have an Ethernet connection to a switch on LAN 2. If the client has issues hitting the internet through the ASUS then disable the wireless and enable the Ethernet port and check results. Maybe take a client and the Nokia router with the 2.5 Ghz wireless on a different SSID and look at results from that angle as well. The Asus ac68u has four Ethernet ports as well as the 802.11ac so take advantage of the physical ports on the ASUS as well. Test and verify. If you have a client with multiple Ethernet interfaces and plenty of resources stand up some virtual machines as well. Linux  would provide yet another data point and physical Ethernet LAN ports tend to just work with Linux. Lots of tools in the Linux environment to play with. Use different clients, Apple, Windows, Linux, Android, Raspberry PI clients. OK maybe I am making assumptions but today it is not uncommon to have all of the above. 

Another parallel investigation you can do is leverage your cell phone and if it is an Apple iPhone put it into field test mode. See if it communicates to the same tower as the Nokia router by confirming both report the same PCI values for the tower signals. Android phones have applications for tower location so yet another option. If you have not yet used cellmapper.net to validate the location of the tower your router connects to i highly recommend doing so. It is simple enough to use and very informative. What cellular channels are you linking to? How strong and clean are the signals? Do the cellular signals bounce/change from one channel to another? Do any of the local devices record errors or drops? Profile the behavior in detail. Focus on any device that can be influential and stands out but keep an open mind on other actors in the path.

Use the web searches to get ideas but focus on the facts. The values and behaviors you can confirm. Don’t overlook all the tools you can put to work. Keep notes and analyze the operation in a systematic periodic manner. 

The objective: Determine with more certainty where the problem resides. Look at the physical layer before you go up the stack. 


thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. There’s a lot to unpack there and I know I don’t have the wisdom or time to get that deep in to this.

 

getting the right dns config on the asus seems to have resolved the issue for me, at least for the last ~36 hours  

 

you mentioned you’d not tried the Pi-hole, it will only takes a couple of hours to set up and will improve your browsing experience. Two tips - don’t go wild adding a bunch of blocklists; get the iOS “pihole remote” app to go along with it  (stats are interesting and it offers the fastest way to temp disable the Pi-hole or add exceptions)

 

W

HWhat are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

So I just lost the b71 tower and I didn’t have a drop thanks to my primary tower. I keep leaning towards it somehow being a heating issue. Either way I’m probably gonna ask for another device to swap out with and see how that goes. I’m at a loss of what it could be at this point. Thanks for your help, I’ll let you know when/if I decide to get that external antenna you showed me via DM.

W

My complaint is about the MiFi hotspot. I purchase this service so that I could work from home having said that I am locked into a two-year contract for service that I cannot use. I am lost for words. I called support only to be told that there are two towers down and that I am on a tower in the middle and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday. Well I start training Monday morning and cannot even connect to the Internet so I guess it’s too bad for me🤬

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My complaint is about the MiFi hotspot. I purchase this service so that I could work from home having said that I am locked into a two-year contract for service that I cannot use. I am lost for words. I called support only to be told that there are two towers down and that I am on a tower in the middle and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday. Well I start training Monday morning and cannot even connect to the Internet so I guess it’s too bad for me🤬

 

There is no contract it’s month to month what are youtalkingg about two year contract???

You can cancel anytime you want no contract no penalty.

Have you used the searchfeaturer to see how to fix your issue? Have you tried different places? If you had you would know that moving the can a few inches makes a difference.

 

B
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I would install a router and use it for your wifi. Shut off ALL 12 wifi connections in the gateway. Everything that you can. I have not seen a vendor yet that produces a combo modem/router that behaves well, especially with numerous devices or heavy usage. They normally don’t have enough memory or cpu horsepower to do all things required. You will encounter a few quirks with your own router, but in most cases it probably will not be noticed.

S

I’m having a problem with T-Mobile 5g home internet that has not been resolved despite many calls in to the help line.  I’ve had T-Mobile 5g home internet for almost a month now, and the short version is that every so often the gateway drops the network.  When I say “drop the network,” I mean to say it throws everything off of the Wifi that it’s broadcasting, and anything plugged in via ethernet says “no network found.  (To elaborate this point, cell phones switch to cellular data because wifi is gone for them, and computers hardwired into the gateway think that they are no longer plugged into anything.)  Turning off the gateway and turning it back on resolves the issue, but doesn’t prevent it from happening again.  Whatever is happening doesn’t seem to affect our connection speed/strength when the gateway IS providing signal to devices in the home, but due to the nature of our work, we need a connection that won’t just disconnect randomly.  

 

To address this, T-mobile has so far run a bunch of tests on their end, and seem to have ruled out a tower issue (which makes sense, as the tower shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not the devices on the gateway’s wifi or ethernet connection get thrown off of the network.)  They’ve sent me a replacement gateway, which is experiencing the exact same problem (3 times in the last 36 hours, in fact).   I’ve noticed that the device gets pretty warm, so I set up a computer case fan as a cooler to force air through the device, thinking that perhaps it’s an issue with the device overheating.  However, while the gateway is notably cooler than it was without the fan, it has not prevented the issue from persisting.  The last thing that I can think to do (and my most recent attempt at resolving this issue) is to plug a router into the gateway via ethernet, and allow the router to handle the wifi/connections w/ devices in the house, and to disable wifi from the gateway all together.  Maybe the gateway is simply too overburdened with connections and gets somehow overwhelmed and shuts down, and having the router handle the “heavy lifting” of taking care of all of the individual device connections will resolve it?  I don’t have a great deal of faith that this will fix the issue (as the gateway also kicks ethernet things off of the network when it experiences this problem), but I’m running out of options/ideas of what to do in order to just get a stable, constant internet service.   

 

Is anybody else having this issue, has anybody resolved this issue, or does anybody have any advice or feedback regarding how I might get this resolved so that I can get back to having stable internet?

I am new to internet with T-Mobile. I just switched over. I’m having a terrible time with the internet just dropping. I was hoping to find an answer to this problem. Unfortunately, I see I’m not the only one with problems 

P

I’m getting a load balancing router and add another connection. This is ridiculous. tornado season is coming and I need a reliable connection. And if this is not resolved soon I will cancel the service. 

R

I am losing connectivity at least 3-4 times per hour (even more than that sometimes!)

I am very frustrated - thought this would be so much better that what we had before, but I am giving it one more month and if there is no improvement I’m switching back to my old provider - NEVER thought I would say that!

N

this service is terrible it has not worked at all lol . most of you at least get it up and running a little i had someone tell me yesterday that 4g towers will soon cease to be working and that we all will eventually have to move to 5g so here i am with a brand new iphone 12 and a 5g home internet service that doesnt work . my advice to you guys is just return it cause no issues will be fixed coming here or calling to that number

BillA
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Log into 192.16812.1 and make sure you are rocking the current firmware (say’s Software) … 1.2101.00.1609.   If not call Tech Support and have them push this update to your Nokia.

Correct placement and orientation also helps, took me months to find the exact best spot, inches can make or break the best connection. I have no alternative ISP so I was forced to learn this the hard way. 

Here in Hawaii my Nokia connects to B2 & N71, huge improvement in speed with the 1609 firmware.  My previous best speeds were 40 down/10 up ... now those are my absolute minimum speeds.  With the built-in WiFi my average is now 80/10. I no longer use the internal WiFi so I turned down the 2.4/5GHz transmission powers to 12%. 

I recently added an Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro SE & WiFi 6 Lite Access point in a double NAT configuration and was surprised to see peaks at 250/70, average 140/40. Until Tmobile gives us bridge mode that’s how I roll my Nokia FG-21. 

I’m now a happy camper with Tmobile Internet. 

 

Dulce est desipere in loco.
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I am losing connectivity at least 3-4 times per hour (even more than that sometimes!)

I am very frustrated - thought this would be so much better that what we had before, but I am giving it one more month and if there is no improvement I’m switching back to my old provider - NEVER thought I would say that!

External antennal if you have low signal solved all my issues.

 

N

@Fredreed I’m still on hold waiting to report this again.  I’ve asked a number of times what they’re going to DO to fix this, and asked more than once if they’ll send somebody out.  I think I’m about a phone call away from cancelling, as this is eating up too much of my time.  I don’t understand how my cell phone can have a constant internet connection, but a device that’s much simpler can’t.  

So I am in the midst of a week long Home Internet 5g dead signal.  Totally agree with this comment about eating up time.  Prior to this issue I was seeing upwards of 100mbps speed.  Have talked to many support people that I don’t understand and they don’t understand me.  So finally talked with a supervisor that I could understand.  He gave me as much info as he could and admitted that they had no idea.  Esentially, he said wait a while and hopefully the signal will come back.  I make the point that my 5g cell was getting a great signal and 50 to 70mbps speed and didn’t understand why the home internet device wasn’t working.  So he explained that the cell phone can handle multiple bands but the home internet only handled one and if it isn’t working then no data.  I also have to decide how long I am going to put up with this mess.

A

I started having issues recently. Was working great, not every so often I have no internet. 

Read here that over heating is a common issue. I turned of wifi and connected my Asus router. Hoping this will help. 

I am working from home, T-Mobile internet is not reliable and I am getting frustrated every day. 

Very disappointed now, stating to consider getting xfinity again. 

R

18 days of uptime is pretty amazing @jdt254 .  If I could get to that, I’d probably just restart the thing once a week just to be sure that we don’t get intermittent faults at times that would impact our work, but at this point, I’m not clearing 24 hours even with a case fan and a router handling the heavy lifting of my home network.  

 

Yes, that would be great if we could get that many days. 

At first i thought it was the cooling as well, but adding the recommend fan did not resolve the issue. Thought it was a quality of signal issue which that area can have that, so i added Antennas, made no difference.
I did find out leveraging cellmapper.net that T-Mobile does NOT have their Antennas directed to my area. They have it up and down the interstate but not aimed north or south. This is horrible because many of my neighbors could benefit from this service since DSL is only 1mbps and overpriced or the overpriced satellite service. Literally live 2 miles, straight shot, to the tower but quality of service is horrible. On my roof i can get maybe 25-30m. On the ground, maybe 10. 

The Gateway did work great at the beginning. Was good and solid, maybe a random drop out every once in a while. But in the past 6 weeks, it has been dropping MOST of the time. We have had it down more than up recently.

Recently, the service has just dropped completely and hasn’t been back up. We are at a week now without resolution. EVen had the Gateway replaced feeling it was a defective Gateway, no resolve.

Considering trying the Orbi (with 4G and external antenna connections) or the POE Powered Elsys Amplimax leveraging the existing SIM card to see IF that resolves the issues. After a call with T-Mobile last week, i told them that they need to determine what is wrong and resolve this in a week otherwise we need to change services because we NEED the internet to be working, especially consistently.

Because when talking to the support agent from T-Mobile, they said they could see it connecting to the tower. But when i looked in the menus in the Nokia Gateway, it kept saying Not Connection. One of my frustrations is the lack of control for a experience IT specialist in this hardware. Because it would make my life easier if i could see what signal strength the antennas were seeing.

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18 days of uptime is pretty amazing @jdt254 .  If I could get to that, I’d probably just restart the thing once a week just to be sure that we don’t get intermittent faults at times that would impact our work, but at this point, I’m not clearing 24 hours even with a case fan and a router handling the heavy lifting of my home network.  

 

Yes, that would be great if we could get that many days. 

At first i thought it was the cooling as well, but adding the recommend fan did not resolve the issue. Thought it was a quality of signal issue which that area can have that, so i added Antennas, made no difference.
I did find out leveraging cellmapper.net that T-Mobile does NOT have their Antennas directed to my area. They have it up and down the interstate but not aimed north or south. This is horrible because many of my neighbors could benefit from this service since DSL is only 1mbps and overpriced or the overpriced satellite service. Literally live 2 miles, straight shot, to the tower but quality of service is horrible. On my roof i can get maybe 25-30m. On the ground, maybe 10. 

Recently, the service has just dropped completely and hasn’t been back up. We are at a week now without resolution. EVen had the Gateway replaced feeling it was a defective Gateway, no resolve.

Considering trying the Orbi (with 4G and external antenna connections) or the POE Powered Elsys Amplimax leveraging the existing SIM card to see IF that resolves the issues. 

Because when talking to the support agent from T-Mobile, they said they could see it connecting to the tower. But when i looked in the menus in the Nokia Gateway, it kept saying Not Connection. One of my frustrations is the lack of control for a experience IT specialist in this hardware. Because it would make my life easier if i could see what signal strength the antennas were seeing.

 

Current 

Running Time: 51d 5h 20m 

Would be another 21 days but I unplug the unit to install a UPS. So that would have been 72 days up.

If you can post your actual signal that would be helpful.

 

RSRP

SNR

RSRQ

RSSI

For both primary and secondary.

And Band for both.

RSRP the lower the number the better.

SNR higher is better on this one.

RSRQ lower is better.

RSSI lower is better.

R

 

Current 

Running Time: 51d 5h 20m 

Would be another 21 days but I unplug the unit to install a UPS. So that would have been 72 days up.

If you can post your actual signal that would be helpful.

 

Currently we also have it plugged into a UPS as well.
The last time it was up, this is the results
Primary: Band B2, PCI 466, EARFCN 901
RSRP    -118dBm
SNR      1 dB
RSRQ    -17dB
RSSI     -86dBm

Secondary: Band n71, PCI 262, NR-ARFCN 126270
RSRP    -107dBm
SNR      -2dB
RSRQ    -17dB

This is from the desk in the house without external antennas connected. Signal hasn’t improved when attaching Antennas. But also after rebooting the Gateway, it would never connect again.

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Currently we also have it plugged into a UPS as well.
The last time it was up, this is the results
Primary: Band B2, PCI 466, EARFCN 901
RSRP    -118dBm This is the worst it can get you really have not signal.
SNR      1 dB Super bad only thing worse is 0
RSRQ    -17dB Just Bad
RSSI     -86dBm Bad

Secondary: Band n71, PCI 262, NR-ARFCN 126270
RSRP    -107dBmv Again so bad
SNR      -2dB Bad
RSRQ    -17dB Ok

This is from the desk in the house without external antennas connected. Signal hasn’t improved when attaching Antennas. But also after rebooting the Gateway, it would never connect again.

OK with reading like this you are lucky to even connect at all.

You will never hold a signal with reading like this I think you have posted the worst I have ever seen.

Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.

You need a major improvement on those number or this will never work for you. I am just being honest as readings like that no way it’s gona work.

R

 

Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.

 

You’re telling me. We did the 2x2 MIMO Log Periodic 4G/5G Hotspot/Router External Antenna Kit from Waveform. https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway

The original results posted were before connecting the antenna. After connecting, nothing.
I did validate that the PCI and EARFCN numbers did correspond to the numbers in CellMapper.net to the tower we pointed the antenna too that is 2 miles away. I am heading back out tonight and will attempt to point it to another tower that is further away BUT it has an antenna that is actually pointed into our direction. 
I also did testing with the waveform app (on LTE though because their 5G side in the app doesn’t work) and that is where i was able to see some interesting results. (I have T-Mobile cell service on my phone to perform these tests.)
 

Name
 Band Tech Carrier Latency [ms] Download [Mbit/s] Upload [Mbit/s] RSRQ [dB] SINR RSRP [dBm]
inside 71 (624.5 MHz) 4G 310260 55 2.2 1.9 -16 0.3 -113
Front West side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 47 4.58 0.15 -15 -2.2 -112
North side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 506 7.44 2.51 -13 0 -111
East side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 171 8.39 4.51 -12 -0.7 -112
South side 12 (731.5 MHz) 4G 310260 833 19 1.99 -18 -5.9 -115
roof 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 75 5.35 1.08 -13 -1.3 -110
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Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.

 

You’re telling me. We did the 2x2 MIMO Log Periodic 4G/5G Hotspot/Router External Antenna Kit from Waveform. https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway

The original results posted were before connecting the antenna. After connecting, nothing.
I did validate that the PCI and EARFCN numbers did correspond to the numbers in CellMapper.net to the tower we pointed the antenna too that is 2 miles away. I am heading back out tonight and will attempt to point it to another tower that is further away BUT it has an antenna that is actually pointed into our direction. 
I also did testing with the waveform app (on LTE though because their 5G side in the app doesn’t work) and that is where i was able to see some interesting results. (I have T-Mobile cell service on my phone to perform these tests.)
 

Name
 Band Tech Carrier Latency [ms] Download [Mbit/s] Upload [Mbit/s] RSRQ [dB] SINR RSRP [dBm]
inside 71 (624.5 MHz) 4G 310260 55 2.2 1.9 -16 0.3 -113
Front West side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 47 4.58 0.15 -15 -2.2 -112
North side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 506 7.44 2.51 -13 0 -111
East side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 171 8.39 4.51 -12 -0.7 -112
South side 12 (731.5 MHz) 4G 310260 833 19 1.99 -18 -5.9 -115
roof 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 75 5.35 1.08 -13 -1.3 -110

BTW I have calle TMHI support a few times to get cell tower details including location, bands,… they had no issue giving me this info so I could make accurate mapping of my area and plot out the best location to put the ant for tower alignment. The waveform ant are excellent you just need to find the best spot.

 

 

M

I guess I should have searched for customer comment on this before wasting weeks with T-Mobile tech support and having them ship me a replacement which did the same thing. I have the same issue… good cellular signal to a nearby 4G/5G tower, but the ROUTER inside the Gateway just quits connecting any devices to the Internet (whether the devices are Ethernet or WiFi). The “tech experts” all seem to be overseas working from farmhouses (I heard a rooster crowing the day for a long time during the call) and really have no technical expertise at all. They have a script that they run no matter what. They start with, “They are working on the tower.” But when I say, “OK, if there is a temporary outage when they work on the tower, wouldn’t the device automatically reconnect after they are done?,” it’s a hard question “off the script” and they have no answer, which means they really don’t know the technology at all, so they just pivot to some other nonsense.

I asked if there was an engineer who could look at the operating system and logs of the Home Gateway I have to see what is failing and when. No. Customers cannot talk to engineers.

They told me I could suspend the service and not be charged for it and then try later in a few months after tower work (which is not going to fix a damn thing).

It blows me away that SO MANY CUSTOMERS are clearly experiencing the same problem and T-Mobile just deploys human robots who pretend the problem is mine and ignore the systemic nature of the problem.

So I guess I will have to write to T-Mobile corporate... and the FCC… and my Congressional representatives about this. There is NO WAY that T-Mobile should get ONE DIME of the new infrastructure money when it is clear they have a DEFECTIVE product/service and repeatedly demonstrate they just don’t care as long as they get their money. They need to DOMESTICATE their Home Internet tech support and staff it with competent experts, not script-reading robots based overseas you can barely understand.

 

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I guess I should have searched for customer comment on this before wasting weeks with T-Mobile tech support and having them ship me a replacement which did the same thing. I have the same issue… good cellular signal to a nearby 4G/5G tower, but the ROUTER inside the Gateway just quits connecting any devices to the Internet (whether the devices are Ethernet or WiFi). The “tech experts” all seem to be overseas working from farmhouses (I heard a rooster crowing the day for a long time during the call) and really have no technical expertise at all. They have a script that they run no matter what. They start with, “They are working on the tower.” But when I say, “OK, if there is a temporary outage when they work on the tower, wouldn’t the device automatically reconnect after they are done?,” it’s a hard question “off the script” and they have no answer, which means they really don’t know the technology at all, so they just pivot to some other nonsense.

I asked if there was an engineer who could look at the operating system and logs of the Home Gateway I have to see what is failing and when. No. Customers cannot talk to engineers.

They told me I could suspend the service and not be charged for it and then try later in a few months after tower work (which is not going to fix a damn thing).

It blows me away that SO MANY CUSTOMERS are clearly experiencing the same problem and T-Mobile just deploys human robots who pretend the problem is mine and ignore the systemic nature of the problem.

So I guess I will have to write to T-Mobile corporate... and the FCC… and my Congressional representatives about this. There is NO WAY that T-Mobile should get ONE DIME of the new infrastructure money when it is clear they have a DEFECTIVE product/service and repeatedly demonstrate they just don’t care as long as they get their money. They need to DOMESTICATE their Home Internet tech support and staff it with competent experts, not script-reading robots based overseas you can barely understand.

 

First have you ever been on other forums? Verizon. Comcast same post so this is not just TM.

 

Bars mean nothing what matters is the signal quality.

Phone app is a bit limited go to 192.168.12.1 on your computer web browser.

First page expand Primary and secondary internet connection signal all that info is needed screen shot ok too.

Then on the left click Status and again expand Primary and secondary cellular network again all that data or screenshot.

Again need 

RSRP

SNR

RSRQ

RSSI

For both primary and secondary.

And Band for both.

With this info we can help you.

 

RSRP the lower the number the better.

SNR higher is better on this one.

RSRQ lower is better.

RSSI lower is better.

This is not really a take out of box plug in and put it anywhere and it works for everyone. Example does your cell phone work the same in every spot/everywhere? No it does not some spots are better some are worse some are terrible. So like any radio device you have to find a good spot. It may take you some work to find the right spot if that’s not your game maybe this is not for you. I am just trying to help you so you can find a good spot and then you get good speeds. I now get at least 650 down most of the time 150 up I pay 1/3 of the price I paid Comcast I also have not data cap. As I said in another post last month I did some moving of pictures to cloud storage used over 2TB of data if I was with Comcast that would have put me over my data cap and cost me an additional $200. So for me it was worth investing some time to find out what I needed to know to get it working well.

But yes this is not like say cable that has yes a cable so it works (well most of the time with Comcast)  it uses a wireless signal and you have to find a good spot to receive that signal.

Again think of it like your cell phone it does not work perfect in every single spot everywhere.

I am just trying to help you out if that’s what you are interested in.

 

M

Sorry, 007BondMI6, but it is not helpful to misdirect to every other possible cause in the universe (maybe it’s caused by Space Lasers!).

My Gateway has been in the same place it always has been and shows three bars consistently, sometimes four. I don’t move it around like a cell phone. What an inane “suggestion.”

I am not stupid and I know where the admin web-based interface is (and you can actually get to it when the router is down, showing the cell connection is fine but the Gateway is not providing routing access to the internet). If it’s all a simple explanation that is technically viable, then T-Mobile should have that explanation on “speed dial” as a document that can be examined and verified. They should ALSO have a “logging” tool on the Gateway to facilitate troubleshooting… it has a web server on it, so there MUST be some kind of operating system. I went poking around this morning and I cannot even find ANY means to identify any of the 20 devices it says are connected. I thought, well, maybe I can just start blocking access by each device to see if THAT is the problem. But I cannot even see what’s connecting (which is more than bizarre… seems like a security vulnerability to me).

I guess we just have to suffer because they are selling a defective service and have people willing to run interference for them. Spare me the “just trying to help” BS. You are trying to DEFLECT. Plain and simple.

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