Question

Home Internet Dreadfully Slow

  • 2 September 2021
  • 9 replies
  • 918 views

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We recently set up our TMobile home internet and after many issues, a new SIM card, the speed is literally 1mbps download!  Unlike the service we’re used to, the troubleshooting tech support has not been great.  Any ideas or suggestions?  Apparently it’s going to take them 5 days to escalate this and get us an answer.


9 replies

Userlevel 5
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If you just read the first several threads that come up you will find a bunch of stuff that will help you.

 

First thing to do is look what is already posted and read.

 

Here I pasted in some recent helpful ones but you can find many more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Userlevel 5
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Other than trying your gateway in various locations, especially a window in your house that is closest to the transmission tower, there’s not much you can do. You can tell if the problem is something unique to the structure of your house by taking the gateway outside on an extension cord.

From what I have read, people who are getting less than 10 Mbps download on this have terrible problems with not only the slow speed, it not being the 50 to 100 they hoped for, but such a low  speed (anything under 10 or so) tends to fluctuate downward and make maintaining any usable connection impossible.

Your best case scenario is that in an unlucky coincidence, you happen to have received your gateway at a time they are doing some extensive work on your tower, in which case your gateway will seek out the next nearest tower, which might be 10 miles away. Thus you’re getting a terrible signal. But this is something the support people should be able to determine, that your tower is being worked on.

For me, before getting the gateway, I knew 5G would probably work for me since my 4G Tmobile phone got between 15 and 50 on the download. I got the 5G gateway three months ago and now get an average of 150 download, with a recent peak speed of 276, and I’m 5 miles from the tower but that tower has the more desirable n41 signal/equipment.   

Userlevel 7
Badge +8

vicki4575 I have a pdf I made that shows the important information to know to help determine how the router is working at a basic level. It provides a bit of explanation as to what the information means. If you are not real familiar with cellular this will help you understand what is going on a bit more. If you capture and post information about your router’s operation this is the kind of info that would help to know. If repositioning the router to improve signals is needed to get better throughput looking at these bits of data are much more helpful than just looking at the generic bar read out on the router LED display. I don’t know if the T-Mobile support engineers went over this sort of data but hopefully this helps. There are lots of threads on the forum so it is easy to go down a rabbit hole. Confirm the basics first then going deeper into other tools can help. 

Userlevel 3
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Well, the official word is that most customers should get 25mbps up and down, some customers will see faster speeds. Unfortunately, salespeople being what they are, they'll tell you anything to get you to take it. 

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Recently (a little over a week ago) I lost all ability to even “see” the Sprint tower only 1.1 miles away Band 41…. VERY fast where I live….  200mbps at times…..  we have two of the gateways here both developed the same issue…. I found myself suddenly connecting to a T-Mobile tower well over 10 miles … After the update to the first device I suddenly got B2 AND n71 and even though it’s far away and only have two bars I have pretty decent speeds.  I had the after the the 2nd THMI gateway was updated I saw same results….. this week sometime …. I will be receiving new SIM cards for both units as tech support still has no idea why I can’t see that nearby tower anymore even though my iPhone with a regular t-mobile SIM card connects both voice and data to it just fine still….    Stay tuned….  developing story…. Oh… I was speaking to tech support today and also found out from another support person that they are sending out ‘new’ sims to many people to fix “various” problems…. he said some of the “original” sims used in the program are not working now….  just a heads up

Recently (a little over a week ago) I lost all ability to even “see” the Sprint tower only 1.1 miles away Band 41…. VERY fast where I live….  200mbps at times…..  we have two of the gateways here both developed the same issue…. I found myself suddenly connecting to a T-Mobile tower well over 10 miles … After the update to the first device I suddenly got B2 AND n71 and even though it’s far away and only have two bars I have pretty decent speeds.  I had the after the the 2nd THMI gateway was updated I saw same results….. this week sometime …. I will be receiving new SIM cards for both units as tech support still has no idea why I can’t see that nearby tower anymore even though my iPhone with a regular t-mobile SIM card connects both voice and data to it just fine still….    Stay tuned….  developing story…. Oh… I was speaking to tech support today and also found out from another support person that they are sending out ‘new’ sims to many people to fix “various” problems…. he said some of the “original” sims used in the program are not working now….  just a heads up

Did your SIM swap fix the issue? Your experience sounds extremely similar to mine!

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Yes…… for an entire 5 minutes….. did the sim swap on both gateways we have over here…. An extremely brief ‘fix’…… recently learned that in our area where I live when you call Tech Support now they can, for the very first time, see the sprint tower on their map and it’s been renamed to T-Mobile Sprint unified and the tech-support people have some indication that it’s ‘about to be turned back on to T-Mobile home Internet users’ when they finish the 5G upgrade…. it appears to be linked to the device identifier number… not the SIM card…. I also read on another group A person with the same exact problem is now reporting that the tower next to them is finally back on a normal and it has a new 5G component to it now …so I guess there’s hope!!

Userlevel 1
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Between 4pm and midnight my download speed is consistently less than 1 mbps. Currently at 7pm is is 0.12 mbps. Tmob is not a cble competitor. Is is more akin to a dial-up provider from the 1990s

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Did you try doing a complete shutdown then restart….. ‘off button’ the unplug the 12 volt adapter…. Wait 20 seconds THEN restart

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