Home Internet Gateway Needs Reboot Multiple Times Daily, Internet Access Dropping

Mine will connect at 2 bars in the morning which allows limited use and then kick up to 5 bars in the afternoon. the morning speed is around 8-12mbs and afternoon runs upwards of 80-100. At 8-12 my computer won’t work and I use Roku, some apps work and some don’t. I’ve had it on all sides of my house, inside and out, even took it up on the roof without any improvement in signal. I would really like to keep it but 2 bars in the morning is unacceptable. Only been using it for 3 days so I’ll give it a few more to see if it settles in otherwise I’m stuck with Comcast. 

The 4G (on my 4G phone) at my house is like that, but even worse with the varying signal strength. Fortunately, the 5G gateway is much more stable and I have gotten speeds up to 190 on 2 bars of signal strength, so speed isn’t always a correlate of signal strength, although it usually is.

One guy responded to a comment of mine. He was a mile from the tower with good sight lines, sometimes had a 5-bar signal strength, but still got speeds of 10Mbps download, or less, and a terrible connection.

If I were you, I would keep the gateway in the location where you sometimes get 5 bars, but experiment with rotating it a few inches either way. And also do speed tests in various locations/orientations you try, rather than just going by the signal strength on the top, and before each speed test at a new location/orientation, reset the gateway by pressing the button off and on. What I’m suggesting is that you may find a 2-bar location that is much faster than another 2-bar location.

How are your speeds in the very early morning hours, say 1am to 5am? Across the board, this is when people usually get the fastest speeds. I’ve read a lot of these comments in the last few months and yours is the first time I’ve read of anyone who has that big a signal strength fluctuation, 2 bars in the morning to 5 bars in the afternoon, depending on time of day. That is really weird.

My best gateway location is in a window facing the closest T-mobile tower, which is 5 miles away. But I get the highest speeds by rotating the gateway from the signal strength on the top from three to two. 5G is actually a non-standalone paired 4G/5G signal and my speeds are best with 2 bars on the 4G Primary and 3 bars on the 5G Secondary. That stuff you can find in the GUI. It doesn’t show in the app or on top of the gateway.

Thank you for sharing all those possible solutions you explored, even if none of them worked it is good to know. You really did it all.

I get disconnected every few days which is more frequent than I got on DSL, but since I live in a rural area where the power will sometimes make the lights flicker, I kind of assumed that perhaps the gateway is more sensitive to short power disruptions than my DSL modem was.

On the bright side, in the three months that I’ve had this, each time I have gotten disconnected, turning the gateway on and off has brought my connection back after the two minute wait, so there has not been one time when I have been without internet service for longer than the time needed to reboot the gateway.

On DSL, if my connection was lost, more often than not, getting disconnected meant anywhere from 10 minutes to three hours or more with no internet. Even though that happened maybe once every six months, I hated when it happened. Until recently, I had no 4G cell phone tethering I could do to get around having no Internet.

In advance of getting this service, I read of many people with this disconnection problem, but I was kind of surprised that when it happened to me, that I don’t mind resetting the gateway. That said, I understand how having any disruptions in service, even if only once a week, for a lot of people would make it unusable, like if they have security systems or even do a lot of critical work-related Zooming/Skyping.

It all depends on what you have available in your area in the way of other services, what you absolutely need in service reliability and speed, and what you want to spend. For me, especially with the unexplained speed boost I’ve had for the last week (download on average 50Mbps faster than I’ve gotten up until now and still on the same n41 signal) with a peak speed of 274 instead of 190, I don’t have any serious decision to make over going back to my single-digit DSL speeds or trying $100/month Star Link. Unless things change, Tmobile is a vast improvement at my house.

Every couple days to, at most, a week, sometimes in the middle of an important Ooma VOIP call, our Nokia gateway stops working. I have the gateway installed on an upper floor near a window, where I get 2 or 3 bars according to the mobile app. The speeds are usually in the 300 to 500 Mbps range for downloads and 10 to 30 Mbps range for uploads, though it seems to be about 1/10th that at night during TV prime time. The gateway is connected to Ethernet and then to a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 router running DD-WRT firmware.

When it works, it works great. The problem is when it stops working and I have to reboot the gateway, at which point the internet comes back up in a minute or two. I called T-Mobile’s tech support after the first instance, where it happened three times within 24 hours, and the agent claimed that it was a temporary problem caused by work being done to the equipment in our area and it should not recur, which, of course, it has. One thing the agent told me that I found interesting is that they have a new gateway, which she implied is not made by Nokia, and that they will be shipping it out to existing customers early next year once it completes testing. Evidently, they’ve had a lot of issues with the Nokia device.

For me, the lock-ups are a showstopper due to my wife’s unhappiness and the fact that when it happens it disables security and other IOT devices in the house and the only way to restore them is to physically reboot the gateway, which can’t be done easily if one is away from home.

As much as I disliked Spectrum (which T-Mobile replaces due to their better monthly pricing of $50 vs. $74.95), I will probably end up back with them since their service was very reliable. The good news is that, as a “new” customer, I’ll get 400 Mbps service (double my previous speed) for $29.95/month for 24 months, which hopefully will give T-Mobile time to work out their bugs and for our local fiber provider ($50 for 500 Mbps) to get from the poles that cross our lawn to the underground utilities we have in our neighborhood. If not, I’ll have to play the switching game once again.

I have the 1609 firmware. Many of the times where I’ve had the issue, my connection quality was three bars, and even with two bars, I still often get 500 Mbps download speeds. Also the disconnections have happened at all times of the day and night. In every single case, rebooting the gateway immediately fixes the problem. I thought about building a device that briefly cycles power to an outlet when it can’t reach a certain URL, then waits three or four minutes before it checks again, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the investment in time and it would not completely solve the problems caused by a dropped internet connection.

After almost two months of T-Mobile’s Home Internet service with the Nokia Gateway and 1609 firmware, I finally got fed up with having to power cycle it at least once a day on most days, and sometimes as many as three, especially in the past week or so. Several outages happened at really inconvenient times, such as in the middle of (Ooma) phone calls, during Zoom meetings for work, and when exercising while watching streaming TV. After the restart, service was always restored, but it was SO inconvenient and infuriating to have to do that so often. My wife kept asking what I was going to do to solve the problem, so we are now back to Spectrum but with a much better deal than we had previously. After two years, when our rate rises again, hopefully T-Mobile will have worked out the problem. I really tried to like it, but the reliability was a show stopper.   

I have one tower about 3200ft from me and another 5100ft from me. It looks like it reliably connects to the one 3200ft away. Sometimes when I restart it is bouncing between a couple of the cells on the nearest tower (Can see on the CID and CGI change.)  

Capcycle, How can I tell which firmware update I have? Also, how do I know which tower I’m hitting? I have one tower about a mile away and another around 3 miles. Thanks.

I am on my 3rd warranty replacement gateway in less than a year.  The problem remains unresolved…  intermittent internet service and the gateway keeps rebooting a couple times per hour.  The unit is plugged into a dedicated outlet and its been located multiple places in front of windows and away from other electronics.   

As a person that works from home, this is extremely frustrating and I cant seem to get the problem resolved.  EVERY technician promises me this problem wont happen again, but here I am trying to complete a review before I lose internet service.  This gateway just isn't working and I’m hopeful that the new gateway release will help.  If not, I will be looking for other providers. 

I noticed that the power supplies were slightly different when I received one of the warranty replacements.  It looks like they added a electromagnetic interference filter on the power supply, so I decided to try both type of power supplies - the original unfiltered power supply and updated power supply with the EMI filter.  It didn’t make any difference.  I also moved the gateway to different circuits in the house thinking that maybe there was too much draw on any one of the circuits.  This didn’t make a difference either.  

Unfortunately My gateway started exhibiting the same behavior tonight. I guess I’ll call T-Mobile tomorrow to see what they will do…

That’s what I had to do in order to build a history of the problem.  The last time I spoke with Technical Service, they mentioned a new gateway that is supposed to be released next month.  Fingers Crossed...

I’m just here to add my voice as another user who would be very happy with the service if it would stop dropping.  Power cycling the unit always recovers it, but that shouldn’t be necessary on a daily basis, and sometimes multiple times per day.  It’s really weird - the LAN continues to work (I can login to the gateway from one of my other devices) and the gateway says it has signal, but all my devices lose WAN access at once.  It really feels like defective hardware/firmware.  Mine is running version 1.2103.00.0338.

Is it worth calling customer service about this?  Sounds like all they do is give you the runaround based on the comments in the forum threads.

I was experiencing multiple drops daily, sometimes multiple drops over a 2-hour period. However, this problem seems to have been resolved. My gateway has held a connection without dropping for 19d 1h 31m. Perhaps there was a firmware upgrade that fixed the repeated dropouts or maybe the “tower maintenance” argument was legit. The current firmware I show is 1.2103.00.0338. Anybody else experience a similar result?