Did T-mobile willfully lie to me about it's home internet service?

  • 19 August 2021
  • 21 replies
  • 2431 views
E
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I installed & activated the 5G gateway on 6/11/21. I tried it for 3 days and since the service was great (50 Mbps-120Mbsp down plus normally 20-25 Mbps up) I cut off Xfinity. 3 days after cutting off Comcast on 6/17, my down speeds have been measured between less than 1 Mbps to about 12 Mbps. Multiple calls to 844-275-9310 number, which are often answered by people who speak with very unintelligible accents, here is what I’ve been told over the past more than THREE months:

-Sales lady: Don’t worry, if the 5g tower becomes congested, the gateway will automatically switch to a less congested LTE tower. (false)

-An actual American lady reset my gateway and said that she had reassigned my primary tower. That apparently actually worked...for less than a day.

-Later call soon after: I was informed that there was ‘modernization’ going on in my area and that my service would be great soon. Also the lady (who speaks clear English) promised me a call back in 2-3 days, which she did, BUT

-Verbatim: “The engineer said to educate the customer that if he turns the gateway off for 5-10 minutes, that it will automatically connect to an alternative tower.” (false)

-A later call, an American told me the truth...no the gateway doesn’t work like the sales lady nor the engineer (through the CS rep) said. That there WAS moderrnization, but there is not any estimated time in which it will be completed.

-The last exchange with a guy I could barely understand, but was genuinely trying to be helpful tried to get a 4G gateway for me since there is plenty of local bandwidth available. Nope out stock and discontinued. He said to try the local T-Mobile shops...out of stock becuase they had to give them to customers with similar problems llike mine. 

I’m just gonna limp along until I can get an intro offer to rejoin Comcast & we’ll be considering switching our mobile service to Xfinity also. 

BTW: We have been T-mobile customers for 21+ years. 

21 replies

jlillard
Userlevel 4
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Have you tried adding a fan to cool it down?

 

E
Userlevel 1
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Have you tried adding a fan to cool it down?

 

Overheating is not the issue here. The speeds are slow after it’s cooled all the way down.

 

D
Userlevel 5
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They recently started to roll out a new firmware which, among other things, is said to have a fix for hunting better bands (ie: properly latching the better of either 4g or 5g, etc).

It won't go out to everyone at once, but in stages, so it may take a while for it to get to everybody.  IDK if they would be able to push to you more directly or not, but wouldn't hurt to ask if you get through to support again.

E
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I did update the firmware about 3days ago. Doesn't seem to help.

drnewcomb
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All this turning off and on “reassigning” etc. should be completely unnecessary on a modern 5G device. It should be able to aggregate signals from multiple sites simultaneously. That’s the whole idea of 5G.

The system is just congested.

Where do you live? Have you moved the router to different locations? Window?

I don't speak for T-Mobile.
E
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Huntington WVa

Yes the gateway has been placed where it gets the best signal

The system is apparently permanently congested...except for the first several days of my service.

Believe me, I’ve tried everything on my end. 

 

E
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They recently started to roll out a new firmware which, among other things, is said to have a fix for hunting better bands (ie: properly latching the better of either 4g or 5g, etc).

It won't go out to everyone at once, but in stages, so it may take a while for it to get to everybody.  IDK if they would be able to push to you more directly or not, but wouldn't hurt to ask if you get through to support again.

My firmware ends with 0178.

Logging into the router, the firmware reads ‘up to date”.

E
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Today beat all…

The internet crashed, not my router, not the gateway, but completely down.

Later it was up, sort of. I’m typing on a computer that is hardwired directly to the gateway. After rebooting the gateway several times the service is so slow that I can’t even access speedtest.net.

It took forever for the browser to connect.

D
Userlevel 5
Badge +5

0178 is an older firmware… Dates back to April or May I think, maybe older.

This just got announced this month… MR4 or something like that.  I posted links to a YT video in some threads about a week ago, someone else posted a link to an article earlier this week too I think.  Will see if I can find the link and paste it in, as I think it referenced the full version number in it.

D
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Link to the TMO report about the firmware release:

https://tmo.report/2021/08/firmware-mr4-rolling-out-to-t-mobile-5g-home-internet-gateway-fixes-poor-5g-signal-and-vpn-issues/

 

v 1.2101.00.1609 MR4

Rollout started 8/09, expected to take to the end of the month.

E
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Thanks djb.

drnewcomb
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Huntington WVa

 

 

 

Huntington appears to not yet have band-41 5G. This means that you’re relying on LTE for most of your capacity. If they sell a few routers in one sector, it could saturate the network.

I don't speak for T-Mobile.
E
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If that's the case, then they should not have sold me the service. Thank you for the information. And I am pissed.

E
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0178 is an older firmware… Dates back to April or May I think, maybe older.

This just got announced this month… MR4 or something like that.  I posted links to a YT video in some threads about a week ago, someone else posted a link to an article earlier this week too I think.  Will see if I can find the link and paste it in, as I think it referenced the full version number in it.

Spoke to tech support today...she said that 0178 is indeed the latest firmware.

 

D
Userlevel 5
Badge +5

0178 is an older firmware… Dates back to April or May I think, maybe older.

This just got announced this month… MR4 or something like that.  I posted links to a YT video in some threads about a week ago, someone else posted a link to an article earlier this week too I think.  Will see if I can find the link and paste it in, as I think it referenced the full version number in it.

Spoke to tech support today...she said that 0178 is indeed the latest firmware.

 


Possibly for your region it currently is.

 

As stated earlier, they go out in waves, usually in the middle of the night to limit the impact of all the rebooting required.  So it always takes time for firmware updates to reach all subscribers.

E
Userlevel 1
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0178 is an older firmware… Dates back to April or May I think, maybe older.

This just got announced this month… MR4 or something like that.  I posted links to a YT video in some threads about a week ago, someone else posted a link to an article earlier this week too I think.  Will see if I can find the link and paste it in, as I think it referenced the full version number in it.

Spoke to tech support today...she said that 0178 is indeed the latest firmware.

 


Possibly for your region it currently is.

 

As stated earlier, they go out in waves, usually in the middle of the night to limit the impact of all the rebooting required.  So it always takes time for firmware updates to reach all subscribers.

I’ll call them again and ask them specifically about the firmware that you posted.

 

D
Userlevel 5
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Spotted this post in a thread elsewhere where someone just got the update:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobileisp/comments/p7qj6n/12101001609_update/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

C
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I’m very disappointed.  I had one week of acceptable service now it’s as slow as a snail.  It started Friday at 6:30 PM.  I work from home.  If I have this problem Monday morning, it’s goodbye t-mo home internet.

B

The “Coverage Map” below indicates “5G Ultra Clarity.” I get 2 bars with a max speed of 1.47mbs. Separating the 2.4G from the 5G, I got 12mbps. That’s hardly high speed.

 

D
Userlevel 5
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@Bajaskier 

Looking at the cellmapper data, you may be latching an antenna aimed more for covering highway traffic (like for 41).  May not be the best option  for various reasons.  May be leaving you on the edge of usable signal, or you may be getting heavily deprio'ed because of oversaturation from mobile customers (home internet packets take a back seat to mobile).

 

May be worth reorientimg the unit to see if you can lock a cleaner link, even if it isn't registering a "stronger" signal (bar wise).  A stronger RSSI can be killed by a low SNR... it will restrict your QAM, which effectively caps your throughput considerably.  Wireless depends on much more than the raw power of the signal received--it needs to also be clean to avoid bad error rates.

 

They also have been running into issues upstream as well... at the peering level.  Has nothing to do with the wireless aspect, but the upstream congestion you may face when you get handed off to other network segments.  This can present itself when you run speed tests to other locations... somewhere further away may suddenly double the throughput. I always test cross country and even into Montréal for comparison to the local spot it automatically chooses.  If you see that happening, you MIGHT be able to reclaim some quality through a VPN.  Hit and miss for various reasons with how a VPN works, but sometimes it can level out weird latency spikes, making things a bit more responsive. 

M
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I installed & activated the 5G gateway on 6/11/21. I tried it for 3 days and since the service was great (50 Mbps-120Mbsp down plus normally 20-25 Mbps up) I cut off Xfinity. 3 days after cutting off Comcast on 6/17, my down speeds have been measured between less than 1 Mbps to about 12 Mbps. Multiple calls to 844-275-9310 number, which are often answered by people who speak with very unintelligible accents, here is what I’ve been told over the past more than THREE months:

-Sales lady: Don’t worry, if the 5g tower becomes congested, the gateway will automatically switch to a less congested LTE tower. (false)

-An actual American lady reset my gateway and said that she had reassigned my primary tower. That apparently actually worked...for less than a day.

-Later call soon after: I was informed that there was ‘modernization’ going on in my area and that my service would be great soon. Also the lady (who speaks clear English) promised me a call back in 2-3 days, which she did, BUT

-Verbatim: “The engineer said to educate the customer that if he turns the gateway off for 5-10 minutes, that it will automatically connect to an alternative tower.” (false)

-A later call, an American told me the truth...no the gateway doesn’t work like the sales lady nor the engineer (through the CS rep) said. That there WAS moderrnization, but there is not any estimated time in which it will be completed.

-The last exchange with a guy I could barely understand, but was genuinely trying to be helpful tried to get a 4G gateway for me since there is plenty of local bandwidth available. Nope out stock and discontinued. He said to try the local T-Mobile shops...out of stock becuase they had to give them to customers with similar problems llike mine. 

I’m just gonna limp along until I can get an intro offer to rejoin Comcast & we’ll be considering switching our mobile service to Xfinity also. 

BTW: We have been T-mobile customers for 21+ years. 

Getting representatives who barely speaks english needs to stop. We have no place in our society for non English speaking reps to help English speaking users. The CEO needs to stop doing this practice. It's frustrating enough to have issues, but having to deal with foreign call center representatives makes it worse. The CEO is a complete moron who won't talk to his customers to even find out their main grievances. Wish I could catch him out on the street and back him into a corner so that he has to listen to me.

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