HI! i can pick up the T-Mobile 5g UC on my iPhone 12 and am considering the T-Mobile Home wifi. Bu, i wanted to make sure the T-Mobile Router would work with the 5g UC. I know it uses 5G but wanted to make sure it uses the 5G UC.
THANKS in advance!
I got this for my Mom’s condo a few weeks back. It works brilliantly! That said, it just says “5G” on the status bar even though my Mom lives in a full 5G UC area. Speedtest maxes out wirelessly around 85 down, 30 up but the same test on my iPhone 13 Pro Max using UC is about 250-300 down, 30-60 up. Sooo yeah. The tech specs absolutely show that the device supports 5G UC 2.5 ghz band n41. I’ve called customer care a few times and they are very much not helpful.
All that said, even in regular 5G it works so fantastic. She streams everything, 4K Dolby Vision, multiple phones and tablets accessing at the same time - absolutely zero issues. Super impressed. Let’s hope they iron out the UC thing soon.
Userlevel 7
+8
pugachev1952,
I could make one suggestion that may help you out. The cellmapper.net site provides information about cellular tower locations for multiple vendors. You can go to cellmapper.net and look for 5G towers in your location for a specific vendor. If you see towers that are transmitting n41 which is the mid-band spectrum then you would see UC however, there is a BIG thing to watch for here. Look at and determine how far the 5G towers are from your home. Also consider the topology. If there are hills and trees and you are in a low spot or on the other side of a large ridge from a 5G tower signal delivery could be sketchy. The n41 delivery has a realistic reach of 2-3 miles given conditions are taken into consideration. If you are on a higher elevation and have a clear line of sight to a 5G tower with n41 and within 1-2 miles of the tower and cell delivery well then you have a very good chance of getting good results. If you are 5-6 miles away from that same tower it is too far away.
The most common solution I have seen are many n71 towers and some n41 but the n41 delivery is usually in high density population areas. Urban vs rural. One thing to consider about the marketing is the use of the term UC or ultra capacity. Hum… maybe that implies the vendors intend to stack up the subscribers off such systems and rely upon QoS as a mechanism to share the spectrum delivery.
The bottom line is you can research a bit and if you have a 5G phone that supports the mid-band frequencies you can use it to locate towers. The Apple iPhone allows you to use Field Test Mode. In effect you dial *3001#12345#* to put it into field test mode and it will report the cellular signal information to you.
CellMapper.net is on the whole about 80% accurate for information users have contributed. It is not perfect but it is one of the best tools out there for finding towers. There is always war driving to find towers but it is very time consuming.
No. 5G uc is not yet supported on the home WiFi gateway. This is direct from T-Mobile tech support. They would not put a time frame out as to when it will be supported. That being said, a good connection will get you 5G download speeds around 150, and upload speeds around 50, which is more than enough for most households.
Userlevel 7
+8
There are some n41 cells they deliver with but not so common in the rural areas like where we are. I have seen some n41 cells in town so I know they are out there. I am pretty sure given the distance to the tower here that I will probably never see n41 delivered here. It is not a huge deal as the n71 delivery here is pretty stable and download and upload bandwidth is more than sufficient for our needs plus the signals are quite good and clean so performance is also good. I just ran a speed test and get 124 Mbps down and 61.4 Mbps up so at 745 p.m. that is pretty respectable. The worst download speeds I recorded was 9.64 Mbps down back in January and that was when the 5G was wonkey. They fixed that problem, which was with the tower or associated equipment. Most of the time service here is actually really good. It is much more reliable than the DSL vendor we had in CA which was a reboot the router weekly or more and we get 10X the bandwidth here with T-Mobile and the n71 cellular delivery for less cost. It is not a win for every subscriber but when it works it is a great deal for the money.
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