Auto switch to different tower when primary tower goes down.

I am pretty confident the T-Mobile gateway is not intended to be treated as a mobile phone. The name pretty much implies it is a static fixture, home internet gateway. The T-Mobile objective is to provide as predictable and reliable internet delivery with these routers and manage the user connections to specific towers to avoid congestion but it probably is about predictable delivery. They know the frequencies in service and the range of delivery for the radios on the towers. Geographical conditions vary so delivery of the service does vary from one user to another. My guess is in some cases they have provided these as possible solutions in some cases where 5G expansion is in the plans but is not completely there with the “intended” 5G rollout. They probably can and do switch the LTE and 5G tower connections from time to time on a case by case basis but it is not designed as an internet solution like the MIFI mobile hotspots. In our area the tower 5.3 miles out, line of sight, is pretty much my only solution. The only other T-Mobile tower I know of in this area is roughly 12-15 miles away and probably not ever a possible alternative due to the terrain here. I joined on the BETA program with the home internet solution in early January and it was very solid and reliable until the end of June. July was rocky with tower connection drops that were random and frequent. Now that they have upgraded the tower and seemingly addressed the issues the primary and secondary signals are solid and performance is improved. Keep in mind the home internet router only shares the characteristic of a mobile phone in that it uses the same frequencies and technology but is not a mobile device. If you take a little time to carefully rotate your router to slightly alter the antenna exposures to the LTE and 5G signals you might see an increase in signal strength. I took time to just rotate the router 15 to 20 degrees at a time and observe the strength of the connection. When I found a position, as I have now, where the 5G has stronger reception and the LTE holds a little less signal strength the LED screen on the top of the router consistently reports 4 bars and download and upload speeds are much improved. Using the web interface to see the operation for signal strength and quality of signal help to fine tune the links to the tower and provide a better overall experience. It takes time and patience but it is worth a little time to investigate the proper orientation of the router. Avoid external electric influences and screens that are metal. Good luck. Hope they get upgrades done on your tower so your solution improves as mine did. Be patient and talk to the T-Mobile support engineers. Some are great at listening and really try hard to help. 

Often, when a tower goes down, the gateway will switch to another band or another tower seamlessly, dynamically. If the 5G equipment goes down on your nearest tower, sometimes the 4G will still be fine, although giving you a much slower speed usually.

However, if your second nearest tower is too far away, you may not connect to it at all, even if your nearest tower is completely down, It helps to know the position of these towers so that, for example, if your nearest tower is to the East, but your next nearest tower is to the West, it will help to pick up that tower by placing the gateway in a window on the West side of your house, if possible.

When you lose connection to the internet completely, the first thing you should do is try to restart the gateway using the button on the side. You probably know this. After pressing it once to turn off, pause for 5 seconds, and then press again to turn it back and wait the two minutes it takes to reconnect.

I’m not sure if the gateway gets more stuck on a certain band or band combination than a cell phone would, but I know for sure that some people when they lose their connection, and patiently waited  3 hours for it to reconnect, they could have reconnected quickly had they just rebooted the gateway immediately, using the method I described above.

Same is true for when a tower that has been down comes up. You might not connect to it, and should try a restart every once in a while.

However, I understand you called up and your tower is down, so rebooting until the cows come home isn’t going to help, until the tower is fixed. The phone people never (or very rarely) are aware of how long before the tower will be fixed. They  aren’t given that information. I’d say the usual time is one to four days. For some people, it’s only a few hours. For others, it’s over a month. The phone people can tell only if it is down or up most of the time. Sometimes they know if a tower is scheduled for a 5G upgrade though, as over half of TMO’s towers are not yet upgraded, but will be in the coming months.

In my experience, even here on this board, some people -- not you -- are terrible at describing their problem, and also letting the person on the phone know that you have some understanding of how all this works, or no understanding. For example, a question recently on a message board, a person asked how could they tell what speed they get. So you have someone calling up like that, who has never done a speed test, and then you have me, who took a little computer programming 50 years ago when I was in college, more courses later on, and have used computers off and on ever since. It helps if you just kindly tell them your level of understanding.

Also, I think a little empathy is in order when dealing with the phone help, wherever they are from. They don’t earn a lot, nor do they set company policy, or have control over how long you had to wait on the phone to get through to them. Try to call in the early morning hours when you get right through, and they’ll take their time with you. I’m just writing some of this for the general audience here.

They have to deal with people who call up who are angry, frustrated, upset, inarticulate, sometimes not very intelligent, hard to understand. I’m sure they get together during coffee breaks and talk about their worst customers, and maybe some who were the kindest to them.

You can locate your nearest towers and their positions, although not all towers are always on it, on the online Ookla 5G tower map. It is simple to use by clicking in and the towers are big black and red dots. But first keep left-clicking in to your location.