Let me start by saying I do like having wireless internet. The problem is I don’t think it is ready for primetime. Speed is great, price is great, but It loses its connection to the internet about once every two days. It’s sad. I have spoken with T-Mobile many times. They have updated my firmware and done other things (I have no idea what they change there), and they tell me that these changes will fix all the problems. Sure! I am getting close to asking them to replace my Gateway to see if that helps. Has anyone had a replacement and found that helped?
5G Home Internet T-Mobile Gateway needs to be fixed. There are too many internet disconnections.
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I think we all agree, disconnections are a problem that needs to be fixed.
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The T-Mobile Home Internet is completely DISASTROUS. The internet drops like 5 to 6 times a day. My partner and I both work from home and this is starting to get really annoying. And when the internet is down, I also can’t even use my hotspot. At this point, we are definitely looking into quitting the service. We’re on our 3rd modem tower from them and the issues keep coming back. This has been an ongoing issue for at least the last 3 months. No one is able to help, We’re both in IT so you can easily assume we have tried EVERY troubleshooting method. We’re switching back to SPECTRUM. I don’t want to support their services but at least they’re better by far in the reliability of their service.
Userlevel 1
Agreed!! It’s happening to me at least twice a day. It actually wouldn’t be so bad if it could reboot itself after the disconnection. I have the latest firmware, router, fan, moved it around the house several times and still regular disconnects. I’m almost a month in and I don’t think I’ve ever gone a full 24hrs without a disconnect.
The T-Mobile Home Internet is completely DISASTROUS. The internet drops like 5 to 6 times a day. My partner and I both work from home and this is starting to get really annoying. And when the internet is down, I also can’t even use my hotspot. At this point, we are definitely looking into quitting the service. We’re on our 3rd modem tower from them and the issues keep coming back. This has been an ongoing issue for at least the last 3 months. No one is able to help, We’re both in IT so you can easily assume we have tried EVERY troubleshooting method. We’re switching back to SPECTRUM. I don’t want to support their services but at least they’re better by far in the reliability of their service.
Disastrous would be if you were attempting to get a better signal by trying the gateway on the roof but you fell off and became paralyzed. A smaller disaster would be if you were like me and had no good alternatives in your area, so if Tmobile ever went wacky on me, I might have to either pay $100/month for Starlink and buy and maintain that stupid dish, or be on CenturyLink’s 1.5Mbps new customer service as the download speed I got before with them, 7, is not offered to new customers.
I’m lucky so far. T mobile home internet works well, kind of like when I went from dial-up to DSL, except this is even a better speed gain bargain price-wise.
As far as trying two additional gateways with no luck at fixing issues, yeah, that’s pretty frustrating and disappointing for you. But realistically, you’re in IT so you must understand T mobile home internet is in its infancy and they are adapting home internet for a system designed for cellphones. Fiber is the best for fast and stable connections.
Besides distance to tower and obstructions (type and number), there are other more quirky factors that can result in just having a home which is in a bad location for this, even things like what your walls are made out of or have in them, or the kind of coating used on low-E windows, which make a window placement for the gateway not work.
Trying to be realistic, what percent of customers who try Tmobile home internet have your level of bad experience? I’d guess that it is lower than 10% and could be as low as 2%. And what percentage of customers with your experience should a company be allowed to have in order to do business at all?
T mobile’s consideration is what level of service to they need to provide to be profitable and beat the competition. My guess is that they are very successful with their new home internet service, and they are trying to expand and improve the service all the time, to win even more market share.
Of course, people working at home need the most reliable connection they can find, and it’s rarely going to be the cheapest.
Your experience answered the initial poster’s question well, just as 007Bond did. Switching gateways doesn’t fix all problems, and some people’s problems with disconnection are much worse than once every few days.
The question might better be, is there anyone who has had this for months and doesn’t get disconnections now and then, or like less than one a month?
Has anyone who knows they now have the 1609 update noticed they no longer don’t get disconnections?
I’d like T mobile to work on their service in the next few months so that EVERYONE gets super fast speed, like the 20,000Mpbs download speed that the CEO of Tmobile said might be possible one day on 5G. And there should be no disconnections and no service disruptions ever. And they should lower their price to $30/month, too.
Unfortunately, this is the real world. “Can you hear me now?” That’s the cellular system.
As noted this is new service and it’s not perfect and sometimes new cutting edge tech is not for everyone as it has issues sometimes.
I am normally an early adopter so I am use to issues new FW, this or that, bla bla bla issues.
I have done way more than the average person should ever do to get this can stable. If this was a perfect world we would just put it where we want power up connect and done. Ain't so.
I started out thinking if my phone gets good speed can should too, hmm not really what happens.
I spent hours mapping out my whole home with my cell before the can arrived found the perfect spot. I ran wires made a shelf real nice stuff. Installed the can and crawling speeds sometimes good then again craw what the heck. Tossed all that work and started testing with the can and more mapping find a good spot think all is well and hours or days later blam craw WTF.
There is no good online source for towers Cellmapper is so far out of date and off it’s next to useless at least in my area. At best it will send you on a wild goose chase for towers that are not anywhere near where shown.
So I use my cell and start manually mapping a 4 mile radius of my home. What I discovered is at least in my area the T-Mobile 4G and 5G towers are not in the same location. So issue is if the can is located where the 5G signal is best guess what the 4G sucks. Yup the flip is true if the can is located where the 4G is good the 5G sucks. That’s the issue I discovered with the can. The can wants 5G but falls back to 4G. Also for my case the 5G tower is 2 times as far as the 4G tower. So if I locate my can where the 5G is good and it decides to fall back to 4G my can craws and does not recover but when it works speeds are great 500+ down for hours, half a day at best.
But if I locate my can where the 4G is best it stays online for weeks really it never drops unless I power off or reboot it. But speeds are not so great 75ish down at best 25ish up sometimes later afternoon slower. Now when I first boot it it will grab the 5G but soon drop it and hang on to that 4G with a tight grip.
So seems the 75 ish handles 2 work from home zoom calls and mother in law streaming Netflix so I have just settled that 75 has to be good enough for now as I just can’t go back to Comcast and the BS deals.
So if you are dropping and you want to keep the can some investigation may land you on a more solid connection. In my case it did as I first started out thinking the fastest speed was the best location when in fact it was not at least for reliability.
Again you have to do your own investigation the online cell tower maps are useless. Based on what I have discovered on current can design the most reliable spot if you are having issues is where the 4G is the best (not 5G) as it will at some point fall back to 4G.
My advice is watch what you wish for.
My original can was clearly new I got good speeds no issues. They pushed FW to it one night and it got stuck in a boot loop. Replacement unit was clearly used and did not work it said RF failure. Next replacement unit again clear it was used worked but has never seen the speeds of the first unit.
Worse is all this shipping took a week and a half so I was down for over a week waiting on replacements.
Current unit is what I would call slow but steady. It gets 75 ish down 20 ish up and knock on wood just stays up days and days with no interuptions.
Now funny my home a few weeks ago and when I ordered months ago was listed as a Ultra 5G covered area. Now I noticed just this week that only my home is now listed as Extended 5G while all my neighbors are Ultra 5G. Now my can just does not hold a 5G signal so maybe they keeps stats and update the map based on customers results. When I boot my unit it will get B66 and n71 speeds will be same 75ish so it’s clear the can is not using the 5G. After a few hours the 5G will just go away and all I have is the primary B66 and there is where it will stay for days and days.
So even though I am a half mile from the tower and 2 miles from a n41 that my phone gets no issue my can never sees them. I am sure the first can did as first can had downloads in the 500+ range. I just don't want to rock the boat as what I have works and my wife and me can work from home all day no interruptions while mother in law streams Netflix all day.
Am I tempted to complain for a new can in hopes I can get back my 500+ yes but not sure I want to take the chance on getting a crap unit.
Other thing is I see cans for sale on ebay and other sites I wonder if they are ok to buy as I did not think TM sold them for ppl to even be selling them. I did see one for $40 I was tempted to grab it for testing.
Userlevel 5
+3
It’s disconnected again. I’m not spending money to test a third party router. I will start looking for another internet provider. I have no other solution since I’m tired of troubleshooting. I just want my internet to be connected.
My home internet drops randomly every few days, but the speed is so slow when it is connected I cannot get above 15 downloading and I live in a sprawling metropolis that they claim to have reign over. So my question is, what’s the deal? My cell phone has outstanding service and hotspot but the stupid can can’t handle more than one device connected to it at a time, which basically makes streaming video almost impossible. It buffers every minute or so. It’s ridiculous.
Really pathetic that this problem has gone on so long without a fix or even an estimate from T-Mobile when it will be fixed.
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+3
I called support again yesterday. They told me that back in July when I called about disconnects they escalated the ticket, and supposedly the reply from the engineers was that I had a bad gateway that needed to be replaced. I have probably called a dozen more times since July, and no on told me that before. They are sending a replacement. I have my doubts that will fix the problems, but it can’t hurt (I hope). I have started to look for alternative internet service. I can’t keep doing this, It needs to work 99% of the time.
Userlevel 1
They have over expanded their network to much for the towers to be able to handle it all. And they just keep screwing more and more people out of their hard earned money. Turn out to be a BS company
Wireless is different from DSL and some other forms of broadband in that when it disconnects, it doesn’t always immediately reconnect, even when there is a connection there. In the three months I’ve had this, I get disconnected a few times a week but every time it has happened, I am able to reconnect in the time I turn the gateway off and on via the button, and wait two minutes for my connection to be back. I understand that for some people, this may not be the case and they experience periods of service disruption, but I think most disconnections on this, people can reconnect immediately in the way I mentioned.
Before I got this, when i read that happens to some people, with some much worse than others like multiple disconnections daily, I thought it would find it really annoying. For me though, it not happening a lot and having it come right back on every time is like nothing. Even though my previous provider, a very slow DSL connection, the disconnections were rare, I never knew whether it was going to come back on in 10 minutes or 7 hours when it went down.
For me, being 5 miles from the tower, this is probably the nature of the beast, getting disconnected every once in a while. The frequency of being disconnected for a user is a variable like speed -- some people get great speed while others don’t -- or ping, where some people can have speeds over 300 but too high a ping if they do a lot of gaming and high ping can cause lagging on videos as well. Another person will have a speed of 100 but good ping. So there are probably people out there who don’t get any disconnections.
I’ve only had the 1609 gateway update for about four days now and it would be nice if I now get no disconnections, but it will take a few weeks for me to know if it did anything for that, and I haven’t heard of it doing anything for that but it would be nice if it does.
Whether this is “ready for primetime” has a lot to do with how many people have this problem enough for it to be serious for them. In my personal circumstances, coming from such slow, overpriced DSL, with bad or pricey satellite alternatives, Tmobile’s 5G is not only ready for primetime, it’s a revolution, 10x to 40x the speeds I was getting. However, although people’s reactions to problems are relative to what they expect, and what they had in the past, it all comes down to location and how it works for you at your location. With some luck, you don’t have the obstruction of a hill between you and the tower that a neighbor ten houses down the street has who can’t get a download speed of over 30 while yours is 400.
My home internet drops randomly every few days, but the speed is so slow when it is connected I cannot get above 15 downloading and I live in a sprawling metropolis that they claim to have reign over. So my question is, what’s the deal? My cell phone has outstanding service and hotspot but the stupid can can’t handle more than one device connected to it at a time, which basically makes streaming video almost impossible. It buffers every minute or so. It’s ridiculous.
Cities sometimes have their towers limited in a direction they are broadcasting, like 40 degrees instead of 360 degrees, as they might be in a rural area. They limit their transmission angles because of signal conflicts with other providers. If your house happens to be in some kind of dead zone, it’s just unlucky.
Get back to us if your speed improves and good luck with it.
Yes so true we think of towers as 360 and just not the case. Just because you have a tower half a mile away and in direct line of sight does not mean that any of its antennas are pointed in your direction.
We’re switching back to SPECTRUM. I don’t want to support their services but at least they’re better by far in the reliability of their service.
I thought of something which might be helpful to you or other users of Spectrum. From reading posts on this board, Spectrum offers returning customers a $50/month price for one year for going back to them. I’ve read of at least two people getting this. You have to have called up and cancelled your service with them to get this deal.
And another guy, who was paying $130/month for 150Mbps service from Spectrum, when he called them up to cancel their service, they offered him a special price of $20/month for one year, if he kept their service. He was new to Tmobile at the time, and not sure if it was going to be good enough for him, so he took them up on the deal.
Incidentally, this is a standard practice with all internet providers, that when you call to cancel their service after having been a customer for years, they will offer you a discount to “keep them as a backup,” or stay with them instead of leaving.
So my advice to you is when you call up, do not say, “Tmobile was a disaster and I’m crawling back to you so you can charge us outrageous re-connection fees” or whatever, but instead just say you’re considering switching to Tmobile, although you will consider staying with Spectrum if offered a good incentive to do so. They will give you a deal. None of these companies want to lose customers.
SAME SAME SAME i kept pushing to keep the first non-refurbished Gateway too, begrudgingly returned it last week along with the second one in hopes that the Texas based tech who was being super helpful was going to solve this issue once and for all with the engineering ticket. No dice. I’m currently suffering and reading this makes me wish I didn’t return my original can. Also writing this on my iPad which is on IPhones MAXUP hotspot added in by one of the many techs I spoke with over the past month - issue began around august. 29 week after delivery of initial can and calling in to ask about the FW update.
Also to note OP’s speeds were 500+ On first can, mine only ever reached 150+. I’ve done the whole she-bang; walked around house, 2nd floor, now its in the guest house in the back facing the tower - has its own personal fan and outlet. I live in ultra 5G area - had the 4G LTE router without much issues - I’m going to ask to switch back to it as ive been working from 10 pm to 3 am every day since the new gateway arrived and i get speeds of 130+ during this time. But as soon as morning hits, I’m watching YouTube at 8:30 and can visually see the quality go from 4K to Unable to Stream. Speeds go down to 0.3 and I’m on MAXUP 100 GB hotspot right now. Which is great but not for my zoom meetings hence it is not a permanent solution. Ive currently set it to auto bandwidth on all SSIDs and channel 6 for 2.4 in order to have at least a connection even if its 1 mbps or less. What gives? Congestion in the area was noted by engineers on my ticket - but this congestion appeared after I upgraded to the can? My area is a private residential neighborhood with mainly only Spectrum. T-Mobile is fantastic out here - has been till this can. Really this can seems to be the issue. Either that or they have to update their towers to connect to these cans unless they are throttling us somewhere else for upgrading our 4G LTE routers to the 5G cans
“I live in ultra 5G area - had the 4G LTE router without much issues - I’m going to ask to switch back to it as ive been working from 10 pm to 3 am every day since the new gateway arrived and i get speeds of 130+ during this time.”
This is my point exactly here is a person that had a 4G gateway and had no real issues with the service. Then they get the 5G can and well things go to crap.
I am telling you these 5G cans depend more on the 4G they they should. Think of it the 4G is the Primary signal. Yea I know it should be going with the 5G and not even using the 4G but seems like that is not really the case. As we know the FW is hokie pokie at best so what makes you think the 4G 5G logic is working as it should?
I can easy move my gateway to a place with good 5G and not so good 4G. I will have disconnections, slow downs, zoom will freeze, Netflix will buffer I will hate my service. But man when it works speeds are blazing fast while it last.
Move the can to the spot it is in now and 5G is so bad that the can drops it but 4G is ok you know solid. Now the speeds not so fast but no drops 2 zoom calls going no issue for me and the wife mom is streaming 4k all day and days and days, weeks, click by without a single interruption.
Should it be this way no it should not but it’s how I got my can to give me solid service. Again I should not have had to do so much investigation to get a service I am paying for working. Sure I really should be getting the speed after all my area is 5G as shown on the map. But I have opted for solid dependable service over speed. Maybe someday they will get the FW working better maybe it’s the towers who knows. But with the amount of ppl having the issues I am banking on FW issue that the 4G/5G logic is flawed.
Might not be an option for you but you may want to try turning off the built-in WiFi router in the T-Mobile Gateway. Try using an external WiFi router connected to the T-Mobile Gateway via ethernet cable.
From what I read on these forums, the built-in WiFi router in the T-Mobile Gateway isn’t as good / reliable as an external dedicated WiFi router. Not only does it raise the operating temp of the T-Mobile Gateway, but it also has issues with poor WiFi routing performance (i.e. disconnects, weak WiFi signal, etc.).
I just read this whole thread as I am experiencing some of the same issues. Hoping to hear if anyone has hooked up a router to at least handle the wifi part and what units work best with the wifi6?
Interesting I am still doing testing and my own mapping since cellmapper is way off at the least in my area it is useless.
Been thinking about an external ant but decided to call tech to ask about towers in my area. 9:30 am they answered in one min got a nice rep. We went over all the 4GLTE and 5G towers. As I have noted in my area the 4G and 5G towers are not in the same locations. So that’s the big rub for me where to put the can to get both not easy. So now I have confirmed what I have manually documented with my own mapping of towers (so way diff then cellmapper they are way way off).
Interesting I have noted many times about how once in a while I get 500+ down and it does not last. This rep was telling me that this tower to my south is being upgraded to 5G and it is still in test not scheduled to go online for another few weeks. So this seems to explain my sporadic 500 down speeds.
Now he warned me few weeks is what is expected but who knows could be longer. This tower is a good shot away almost 3 miles to the south. But there is kinda a valley between me and the tower so could be ok. The actual closest 5G tower is not in a great spot NW 2 miles flat land with lots of trees and warehouses in the way.
Now with the 4G tower .5 to the W and the 5G 2 miles to the NW that’s doable from the window I am in but I can never hold the 5G tower for long. This is where the ext ant could help.
But maybe I wait a bit and see if the farter 5G upgraded tower is better. Yes farther but less obstructed IMO. Also speed testing of the 5G tower to my NW is not great speeds are only 250ish near the tower so not sure its a great.
Main issue is if I put the can on the S window to grab the newer soon online 5G tower I have no shot at the 4G tower to the west. This is again where the ext ant could help I could place it outside on the corner of the house there it would see the 4G tower ok and also the 5G.
Again I have so many man hours invested in this whole process. But seems things are on the way to improving with upgrades.
But on the topic of disconnections going on 13 days no drops on the 4GLTE tower. I only unplugged it a few weeks ago to put it on a UPS otherwise we would be at almost 4 weeks with no drops. So if you can get it in a spot it likes it does stay on the tower.
I’m reading the comments r/t internet disconnections, & all the effort going in to trying to achieve decent internet, & I’m thinking it shouldn’t be this complicated!! The customers seem to be the ones doing all the work!!! We are restarting our router multiple times daily, they have sent out a new router, we’ve been on the phone with tech support so much I think they recognize our voices now & draw straws to see who has to deal with us THIS time… and still it’s the worst internet I have ever experienced. It’s worse than dial-up. They are about to lose our service. The only reason I’ve hung on this long is that in our neighborhood, there aren’t very many alternatives. We can get satellite, but the lag makes it impossible for my son to do what he needs to with his live stream activity. Someone suggested a Verizon hot spot, which I am going to look into, but other than that, we can’t get AT&T, can’t get Fidelity, can’t get SuddenLink… and on top of that, there’s been a DDoS event for the last three days - I can’t get customer support or any other isp on the phone as a result of that!! Thanks for letting me vent - it helps to see that I’m not the only one having this problem.
Userlevel 5
+3
I don’t care wether you agree with me or not. You don’t know what I’ve done and you really shouldn’t be assuming you know more than I do as far as what I’ve been through. T-Mobile internet doesn’t work and there’s plenty of complaints about their service. And I’m paying the same price for my new internet as I was paying for T-mobile internet, and it works. So for you to assume I’m paying three times the amount as t-mobile internet is an ignorant assumption. Because you’re WRONG. But it sounds like you don’t like being wrong, you just like assuming something you know nothing about.
What service did you switch too? It’s great if some people can make the gateway work, but having to reboot it 1 to 3 times a day sure indicates to me there’s a problem. It’s too bad that T-Mobile doesn’t know (or won't admit) how to fix it. I have to believe it’s the gateway since I don’t have problems with my 5G phone connection.
I could live with the disconnect issue try going 4 weeks with no service
Was good now seems to happen more frequently with latest update. Could be related to number of devices connected and with nbackend (Tmobile servers) unable to handle and so it freezes and then disconnects. Doubt overheat or signal problem as I seem to have neither. Could even be tmobile servers overewelmed in general and they are rebooting their system. Agree needs fixing.
Same issues, same no-fix/no results from TMob no-customer service….we have to switch. I work from home and can’t even download my email anymore. This cannot go on anymore for me.
I don’t know what happened. At 1st this was great, now it is just absolutely useless. Been watching old DVD/Blu-Rays because watching streaming isn’t happening. Sorry to say it, but we are gone...probably will switch our cell phones too. Just bad customer service and products all the way around.
Over 3 weeks without our Gateway functioning and waiting for our second replacement. It worked perfectly for nearly a year and now it won't connect to the internet. Each time I've been on the phone, we do the troubleshooting and I ask about the towers...no clear answers. I live in a rural area. We've come to depend on the gateway access. If I look it up on a map, it shows it's not available in our area, yet we've used it steadily for a year...then suddenly, it stops. They graciously gave me 100 GB of data on my phone's mobile hotspot, but it's gone already. (Plus, they took the $35 fee off for the data boost. Gee, thanks) I'm no IT expert but if our phones work with mobile hotspots just fine, why not the gateway? And the fact they can boost our high speed data temporarily for the inconvenience? I say it's ridiculous and grossly unfair to remove our access to the gateway service after we become dependent and accustomed to having great Internet access. But when the 3rd gateway gets here, if it doesn't work, I'm not sure what I'm going to do...or say. But I'm re to go back to our previous provider.
After fighting the daily need to reboot, and reading that tmobile has offered no real answers, I took it back and dropped the service. I’d LOVE to have a reliable device and would buy one in a heartbeat. No real problems with the performance just the reliability. I cannot accept having to reboot it at random but daily times. I have lots of stuff on my network that have to have a connection. I never tried the wifi since I already have a complex wifi network. I just took the WAN cable from my existing Netgear router and plugged it into the ethernet port on the gateway and it worked perfectly. Good idea poor implementation IMO.
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