Question

Home Internet Gateway 2 Mbps

  • 14 June 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 171 views
E
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I’ve had the T-Mobile Home Internet Gateway for almost a month and most of the time it’s really slow. We get 5 Mbps down and 0.15 Mbps up from Frontier, so when I got 20 Mbps down and 20-30 Mbps I was thrilled. Then the cars and buses came. 

Sometimes during the day it can’t even connect to the speed test page, but usually it’s 2-3 Mbps. It’s getting slow at night now, tonight it’s 2.61 down and 0.49 up. I didn’t think anything could be slower than Frontier but this thing is.

I live in a really small town in Arizona. We have one 5G cell tower and we sit on US93 and Pierce Ferry Rd the road to the Grand Canyon West. One million cars and tour buses go down Pierce Ferry Rd every year. Why can’t T-Mobile figure out we only have 2000 people here, but thousands a day go by using their phones. Do the math ten 40 passenger buses with 30 cars between each and everybody taking and sending videos. If you drive here drive carefully. We have one ambulance that covers 2000 sm’s and in April we had 28 accidents and 23 fatalities from Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon West.  

On second speed tests tonight the speeds were so slow it couldn’t connect to the test page…

Any way to actually talk to someone at T-Mobile?

3 replies

jlillard
Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Have you tried putting a fan underneath to keep it from overheating?

 

tmo_mike_c
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +14

We do have an Internet issues section with some helpful steps you can try to get the internet working a bit better. You may need a Trouble Ticket filed which our Tech Care team can help file for you if you give them a call.

T
Userlevel 3
Badge +2

How far are you from the tower? I am 5 miles from a tower but out in the open with few obstructions and get download speeds of between 60 and 190Mbps. 

Before the tourists arrived, you should have been getting a higher speed if you are connecting to the 5G properly.

You can tell what bands you are connected to by going to the GUI for the gateway, by entering 192.168.12.1 into any URL box. From there first click on OVERVIEW on the left to see your signal strength (in bars) of the primary signal and secondary signal. If you do not see a secondary signal then you are on 4G only.

Next click on STATUS on the left to reveal a menu with drop downs to see what bands you are on for the primary, or if you have it also, the secondary. The primary is band with the prefix of B followed by a number, and that is 4G. The secondary is the 5G which works together with the primary, and its prefix is n.

You can click to various combinations of bands, sometimes, by rebooting (turning the gateway off and back on, not your computer), and that way you can find out which band combinations work best for you. For me, B2 and n41 work best whereas B66 and N41 are slower, and the slowest of all is a Primary, like a B66 without the secondary even showing up.With only the primary 4G, my speed drops into that 20 to 30 range.

If you haven’t, experiment extensively with the gateway placement and orientation, everything from in a window on the side of your house nearest the tower, to up high as you can put it, if you have an attic, try that. The tower I connect to is on the East side of my house so my gateway is in the window facing east and I’ve put some parchment paper on the inside of the window to protect the gateway from the sun in the morning, which can be intense. You don’t want this thing overheating. For me, when the sun moves to it’s afternoon position, the heat is not a problem in that window.

You are probably onto something with the number of tourists crowding the network, but your alerting T-mobile may go some way in informing them they need to add capacity to that tower.

I too was stuck on a single-digit download speed on DSL, and would have been happy with 30. Now that I get 100+ most of the time, I’m delirious. I think I’ll wake up and it won’t be true.

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