Question

5G home internet keeps dropping


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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?


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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.

OK if you don't want to post signal readings you don't want help that’s ok with me as my setup works great. BTW that is a copy past as I need to post the same info for so many posts so it’s generic not to you personally. If people can post signal I can offer advice to help them if not well they must not actually want help.

I seems more than arrogant and condescending for you to conclude that if people take issue with your attitude then they don’t want help. You have great service and that much is clear. This is about those people who are not so lucky.

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I seems more than arrogant and condescending for you to conclude that if people take issue with your attitude then they don’t want help. You have great service and that much is clear. This is about those people who are not so lucky.

You could have great service too if you would just post your readings and take advice. You seem like you more want to complain about your bad service then be helped. Remember at first I did not have good service I had issues like you. I had to do my own investigation and figure out where towers were what band they had and where I could get the best signal. Only after moving my unit around for oh like a month and adding and ext ant did I find a great spot with great service.

Maybe you misunderstand me you said “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.”

As I have stated so many time Bars mean nothing at all it is the signal quality that matters. So you could have 5 bars and such a low SNR that it just does not work. So if you post real data not bars you could be helped. If you search you will find post where people move it around have less bars but better signal quality and better service with less bars. So no I am not insane but you are a fool if you think moving it around won't help you. But you know keep it just where you have it and keep complaining about your service I guess. If you knew even a little about how signals work you would understand that moving it would help. But again seems like the bars are really working for you so keep on that path and don't accept help. Why take 2 seconds to post your reading and get some real advice when you can keep saying that you have 3-4 bars and bad service, sounds like a plan to me.

Again if you really wanted help with far less effort you could have posted your signal readings and already had some solid advice. The fact that you have not is what indicates you really don't want help. People that want help take advice when it’s given and don't keep posting about their problems over and over.

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

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.

Here is the larger question, has anyone has “reliable” service with T-Mobile’s 5G service, not just with the gateway but with your mobile phone? Because i have not. With 4G, it’s always been responsive unless the signal was too week. But with 5G, there are times it just STOPS working (drops out), where upload is non-existent. (Ran multiple speed test to confirm this.) 

This frustrates me because T-Mobile advertises this AMAZING 5G service that is unstable and unreliable, not just for the Home Internet but for the mobile devices as well. I have to take my phone’s settings and turn off the 5G part to have reliable connections. 

Here is the big thing. For a Home Router, that has massive antenna’s compared to my phone, meaning it should have a stronger and betting quality signal than me phone has, has a WORSE connection.
If it is really the towers, then why does my phone work better?

TBH, this is the first get of a 5G product. Like WIFI 6, it is also new. So i expect it will be 1-2 years before we have reliable consistent products for the 5G space. I have tried to look for alternative home routers and home everything is about $1k in prices for a 5G router. You know T-Mobile isn’t giving you, for free, a $1k dollar home router. 

@007BondMI6 I found this thread and appreciate the help you are providing to others. I have had T-Mobile home for about two months now and really like it when it is up. Every few days, even if it shows a good connection, internet stops working so I have to restart it. We are not using the wifi on the router because we already have a mesh network. I disabled the wifi on the router a couple of times but every time I reboot it the wifi comes back on and it is a pain turning all of them off, so I have left them alone lately. I live in New Orleans 4-5 blocks from a tower. The home gateway is 7 feet off the ground, next to a window and consistently gets 3 bars. I tried a few other places in the house but was only able to get it up to 4 bars and I have several hardwired servers in the office so was happy with the 3 bars.

 

Primary Signal - PCI 276 / Band B66 / EARFCN 66711

RSRP -97 dBm

SNR 5 dB

RSRQ -14 dB

RSSI -64 dBm

I have seen SNR as low as 1 dB though. Seems to fluctuate

 

Secondary Signal - PCI 101 / Band n41 / NR-ARFCN 509790

RSRP -99 dBm

SNR 18 dB

RSRQ -11 dB

 

I was also wondering what you are getting from your primary and secondary signal so I can see how far I am off from a solid connection. Thanks for the help!

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@007BondMI6 I found this thread and appreciate the help you are providing to others. I have had T-Mobile home for about two months now and really like it when it is up. Every few days, even if it shows a good connection, internet stops working so I have to restart it. We are not using the wifi on the router because we already have a mesh network. I disabled the wifi on the router a couple of times but every time I reboot it the wifi comes back on and it is a pain turning all of them off, so I have left them alone lately. I live in New Orleans 4-5 blocks from a tower. The home gateway is 7 feet off the ground, next to a window and consistently gets 3 bars. I tried a few other places in the house but was only able to get it up to 4 bars and I have several hardwired servers in the office so was happy with the 3 bars.

 

Primary Signal - PCI 276 / Band B66 / EARFCN 66711

RSRP -97 dBm Not good does not get dependable until it gets into the low -90s

SNR 5 dB boarderling Ok

RSRQ -14 dB OK

RSSI -64 dBm could be better.

I have seen SNR as low as 1 dB though. Seems to fluctuate

1-4 really bad.

 

Secondary Signal - PCI 101 / Band n41 / NR-ARFCN 509790

RSRP -99 dBm Not good does not get dependable until it gets into the low -90s

SNR 18 dB Great super

RSRQ -11 dB OK

 

I was also wondering what you are getting from your primary and secondary signal so I can see how far I am off from a solid connection. Thanks for the help!

Things to flux but here it is right now.

I had to add the external ant to get to this level otherwise I was as bad as you are and same issues as you.

Primary Signal

Connected

RSRP-76 dBm

SNR 6 dB

RSRQ-13 dB

RSSI-43 dBm

Secondary Signal

Connected

RSRP-80 dBm

SNR 7 dB

RSRQ-12 dB

 You should try to move things around to see if you can improve the reading but once you get to the best if it is not enough then only answer is ext ant.

 

TW 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.

 

Well, i ended up removing the product. The Antenna worked create once i changed the angle to look up higher. But apparently T-Mobile did fix the tower as well.

With the Antenna, i was getting a pretty symmetrical connection, like 35m U/D. I went from 3-13m to 30-50m down. Far better connection now. But after this experience, i took the antenna down, posted it on ebay. Working on next steps for this Gateway.

the connection was much better even though the quality was low.
But at the end of the day, the final results were on 4G and the secondary connection was the weaker 5G (650mhz) connection. 

Holy S(&t I thought it was just me🤣. Just got mine a few hrs ago and I’m ready to punt it. Now I see…. It sounded so good too, 50$ a month 5G. Fml well I’ll send it back tomorrow. Not wasting anymore time on this crap. 

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So I have the same problem with repeated drops. This happens multiple times a day. After a couple minutes the Nokia gateway reconnects, but this behavior is unacceptable. T-Mobile support has been of no help. I have attached pictures of my screen showing the dropped connection and the primary and secondary signal numbers after the reconnect. If someone can decipher these numbers for me I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Primary Signal

RSRP -64

SNR -5

RSRQ -17

RSSI -31

Secondary Signal

RSRP -110

SNR 7

RSRQ -13

Loss of signal and reacquisition of signal.
 

 

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I watched this video last evening.  I watched it again this morning.  I placed my order on Amazon for the Dynalink.  I think this is the fix for me.

 

 

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This seems to be good for stabilizing and improving the WiFi signal when it is connected. But will this prevent multiple dropped connections? 

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How the Hell do we get any resolutions from this absolutely gigantic fail of a support system at T-Mobile? Support   Are any T-Mobile people monitoring? Probably not because they don’t want to address this issue!  I have called over ten times over a month for this issue and keep being told either an Engineer will call back or that my problem ticket number is expired! WHAT THE FK!   This has got to be the worst support EVER!!!

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I watched this video last evening.  I watched it again this morning.  I placed my order on Amazon for the Dynalink.  I think this is the fix for me.

 

 

Yea no it’s not going to help this issue.  If the Main internet router is cutting off then this will be of Zero use.

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’m having the same issue.  This isn’t going to work for me, especially when I’m not obtaining any logical reason behind the consistent disconnects.  It doesn’t make sense when the phone data works perfectly fine.  It's reasonable to believe if the cellular data is working, the gateway should as well.  Now I have a representative who is guaranteeing me it won’t happen again.  We shall see.   

I watched this video last evening.  I watched it again this morning.  I placed my order on Amazon for the Dynalink.  I think this is the fix for me.

 

 

Has this worked?

I've had my 5g home internet for Two  months now. When it is running properly,  I have download at 120-140 Mbs during wee hours of the morning and 40-50 Mbs during daytime.

WHEN IT IS RUNNING PROPERLY!

My complaint is performance is consistently inconsistent! Frequently performance drops to less than 1 Mbs. Then mysteriously starts working again. Lots of times this is unnoticed when browsing but since I took advantage of their special offer for Youtube TV, It becomes obvious when the streaming is constantly buffering or providing a fuzzy picture.

If T-mobile wants to succeed as an internet provider, they need to provide more consistent reliable service.

CONSISTENTLY,  INCONSISTENT DOESNT CUT IT!!! Occasionally poor is bad enough.

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it’s disheartening to see this has been happening for months to multiple users, and they act as if no one reported this to them if you call customer support

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My gateway internet dropped out at least 20 times yesterday, sometimes within minutes after it reconnected. T-Mo customer service said it’s because there is maintenance work going on at the cell tower I connect to and that it will take another several weeks to complete. I find it hard to believe this is the cause of repeated dropped connections that have been going on for over a month now. My phone service is fine, just the internet drops repeatedly using the gateway. There must be a better solution.

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same increasing disconnections and same response from customer service. I believe tower maintainance is what they have been instructed to say and hope you take it at face value: of course it’s not. It appears to be same if they escalate to engineering, which will give the same explanation after 72h so they can close the ticket and stay within acceptable metrics.

 

it’s disheartening to see there’s no one actively looking at the problem and there is no open communication about it (“we are aware, you will experience disconnections, we don’t know what’s going on, we’ll keep you updated”)

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Yes, very disheartening. My experience with customer service and “escalating” complaints to the engineering team has been completely unsatisfactory. There must be a way to get them to pay attention. When I have seen online reviews of the gateway I have contacted the reviewers to let them know of the problem but that has not resulted in any action. At some point, T-Mo will have to take action or customers will take their gateway “trashcans” and throw them in the trashcan.

If you think that heat is potentially an issue, a good first step may be to decrease the broadcast power. The default router setting of 3600 mW is a lot of power that you probably don’t need if you are just using inside a normal-sized home. I decreased my 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz transmission powers to 25%.

I just made the change, so we’ll see if that reduces the frequency at which I must reboot.

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Heat is not the problem in my case. The gateway is not hot. And I turned off the broadcasting on all SSIDs because I have it hooked up to another router by Ethernet cable, so the gateway only functions as a modem. Nevertheless, there are still multiple dropouts all day long.

@jdt254 already linked to my overheating post.  Even with two cooling fans running when I was using the built-in wi-fi I would still lose my connection every few days.  Offloading the wi-fi to a dedicated router helped me get an 18 day uptime.  I think I managed to crash it last night with a solid upload and download running at the same time.  I’m also only getting a 4G connection.  If you’re getting 5G speeds it may run even hotter.  I would definitely switch to a dedicated wi-fi router though.  Rebooting twice a month is much better than rebooting twice a day.

Can you tell me exactly how you got this set up? I'd love to not have to reboot our gateway several times a day just to watch a YouTube video.

Seems to be a thermal issue and needs to be fixed. Gateway reboot issue is still there. Can’t work on any social platform or website.

Seems to be a thermal issue and needs to be fixed. Gateway reboot issue is still there. Can’t work on any social platform or website.

still waiting for the solution ;-(

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