Cannot get a secondary signal

How far are you from the tower and if you know where your tower is, are there a lot of hills or forests in the way between you and the tower? If you have a distance over 7 miles and/or obstructions, that could account for they weak signal and not picking up the Secondary, which means you aren’t getting 5G. You probably know this already since you seem to have a good handle on the meaning of the data, but I’m just stating it for people who may be just starting out.

There is one more possibility and if I were in your place I would try it only if I had good sight-lines to the tower and were less than 7 miles away from the tower. That is you may have gotten a defective gateway. You can call them and just say you’ve tried everything, really want it to work, and just ask them if you can swap it out.

Another possibility is the 5G equipment at your tower is down, and once it is up, you’ll get the Secondary signal. If that were the case, it is unfortunate the service department can’t give you a specific answer on that for your tower.

I just watched a video of a guy who had been on the old 4G white modem for a year and switched to the 5G gray can and was disappointed he got only 10 to 20 in speed on the gray can. But after a short time, the can got stuck in re-boot mode, kept rebooting itself over and over and wouldn’t work at all. So they let him exchange it for a refurbished can and bingo, speeds around 80+ and he is very happy.

So that is the last-ditch effort people who really want Tmobile to work for them will try, who don’t have a good service provider alternative to fall back on. Unfortunately, most people who try swapping out their gateway find that isn’t their problem.

I read some of your previous posts and saw you mentioned getting 16/1 speeds on Frontier, your former provider.The policies of these companies vary. Some might even charge you for a re-connection fee. But many will give a price break if you are coming back to them, at least for one year. They want to get their old customers back. It is a big loss for them.Then in a year you can try again with Tmobile and see if they’ve improved.

When Tmobile gives you that stock line about “constantly improving,” in general, that is true. I’ve read a lot of the speed progress from beginning of the 5G rollout just less than a year ago and speeds are getting better. But you don’t want to be stuck for months waiting.

The problem of having to reboot to get a secondary signal has not been fixed. If you are getting over 100 down on the primary (4G LTE) alone, that means your house is in a specific location where the 4G is good and the gateway just selects the strongest connection.

There is no practical problem in getting 4G instead of 5G, as long as the speed is comparable. In fact, a small minority of people can get faster speeds on 4G instead of 5G, and they would be better off not connecting to the 5G signal.

The people for whom it is a problem are those who get a speed of, let’s say, over 80 on 5G but then when they connect to 4G alone, their speed drops to a few Mbps or much slower anyway.

Although I haven’t connected to 4G alone in weeks, partly from finding a gateway placement where I get a strong secondary signal, and partly because it was a very rare problem in the first place. I know that if I had the problem more of not getting 5G, it would have been annoying since my 4G speeds are very slow compared to 5G.

Also, many people, like myself, can get pretty wild speed fluctuations on the same 5G signal pair, but my speed is very rarely going below 100, and quite often it’s over 250, but this is not a problem for me because I do not have five people in the house all downloading or streaming games or 4K smartTV programs at once, as some people do.

I have some personal experience with the band combination switching though, because I do get switching between B2/n41 and B66/n41, and I restart the gateway (via the button on the side) in the morning to get my faster 5G signal pair and it usually sticks to that combination all day.

I understand that for you, since your 5G gets you 50Mbps faster, you would prefer that speed, and you can try certain gateway locations where that might be more likely to happen, but often, it’s not something location can fix.

So far, T mobile doesn’t do firmware updates (which are pushed out automatically) very often, and they don’t result in the speed jumps like a new equipment installation at the tower can.

For my first few months of use, I had a peak speed of 190 down, my highest ever speed, and then one morning about 3 weeks ago I was getting speeds of over 200, and have had those every day since, on the same band combination and getting the same signal strength I had from the beginning. Just a few days ago, I hit a new peak speed of 420 down.

I try to keep the comments of people who have terrible problems in perspective, even those who had great speeds for months and then their speed drops to nothing. It’s not happening to that many people, or even likely to, just because it is happening to them.

So, having a relatively fast 4G-alone connection at your house can be a good thing, not a problem.

I have the same issues.  
Tried a panel antenna but it didn’t seem to help.  
Cellmapper just doesn’t cut it.  
Have you looked at Ookla’s 5G map?  Google it.  
Supposedly it is from trusted sources and their own data.  It is updated weekly. 
I don’t know accurate the indicated cell tower locations are.  Maybe this will help all of you.  I really want this to work well.  I want to kiss Spectrum good bye. 

I think they are playing with tower signals to gateway. I get strong n71 secondary signal then lately it drops completely with 0 bars for a half day then comes back again 5 bars. The interesting thing is my cell phone gets the n71 signal WHEN THERE IS NONE ON THE GATEWAY. So it is not a signal problem. Tmobile must be able to kill the specific band to the gateways.

I get a sold 5 bars 4G and since I purchased 4 bars of 5G and my speeds were great 200-300.

Suddenly, 5g stopped - zero, nothing at all no connection - we swapped modems really tried everything, I’m only about 2 miles away, maybe less - same tower, the only tower in my area and I can see it so there are no obstructions.

Why did 5G stop, in my conversations with T-Mobile they cant seem to do anything because they are not the admins, I do get 50 megs or so with 4g so it’s acceptable, but not what it was for over a year…

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.