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Home Internet - Sudden consistent signal degradation

  • 3 October 2021
  • 6 replies
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We’ve had 5G home internet for several months and have loved it. Signal strength to the router was consistently 3 bars, occasionally jumping to 4 bars, but we were seeing speeds of 200+/75 down pretty consistently. A slow day would be around 100/50, still enough for two people to work from home. For the past few weeks the signal strength has dropped to 2 bars and has stayed there. Download speed has dropped to around 80/40 which is becoming a problem. Coincidentally this started around the time of the last firmware update (I also started getting the “Device Overload” error, but a factory reset fixed that). Has any one else experienced this or know what the solution is?

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Best answer by Timsw 4 October 2021, 14:25

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T
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As far as mysteries go with speed changes, I have one that is even stranger. I’m on the same signal pair (B2/n41) with the same signal strength as I started out with but my average speed went from 90 1o 190 one morning. For the first two months my peak speed was 190, and recently I hit 420.  

If I had your problem, a signal drop like that, I’d suspect I might be on another tower. Or, they adjusted the fan pattern of transmission in a way that it degraded the signal to your house. Another reason could be they turned down the transmission power on your tower. They might do that when they have a conflict with another carrier’s signal.

While I haven’t read of a person having a gateway performance issue like your particular problem needing a new gateway, that’s something you could probably consider. But call first and see if maybe they know they are doing work on your tower, in which case no need to go through the fuss of trying a new gateway.

Since there’s a possibility you are on another tower. if let’s say they are doing maintenance on your old tower, you should try a different location/orientation for your gateway, if you haven’t already.

When I got my speed boost, I thought some new gateway location/orientation experimentation was warranted to optimize it, and it did.

I started a thread on the 1609 firmware update and no one has reported that issue, nor has the firmware ever done something to a person’s signal strength that I’m aware of. I got my speed boost a week before I got the 1609 firmware update.

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I am having serious stuttering problems.  I have similar speeds to yours (50-350mbps) but if I use video streaming or zoom calls, there is frequent pauses and stuttering.  I also have 3 bars and “good” connection according to the Tmobile Internet iOS app.  Just trying to get a sense if stuttering and pauses are normal on video streaming as that is a deal breaker in a WFH environment.

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I am having serious stuttering problems.  I have similar speeds to yours (50-350mbps) but if I use video streaming or zoom calls, there is frequent pauses and stuttering.  I also have 3 bars and “good” connection according to the Tmobile Internet iOS app.  Just trying to get a sense if stuttering and pauses are normal on video streaming as that is a deal breaker in a WFH environment.


How is your SNR (signal to noise ratio) on the Secondary band in the GUI, your ping on Ookla speed test, and your jitter (I use the online AT&T/ookla speed test which shows jitter)?

Zoom call stuttering or pauses/lag can be caused by problems on the other person’s side of the connection, ones which aren’t your fault. But if it’s pervasive, or you didn’t have this problem with your former service, then it’s probably something with your connection. And yeah, it’s the nature of your particular environment, your location.

So SNR, the higher the better, and ping and jitter, the lower the better.

One more thing I’m adding...sometimes stutter can be a wifi issue. If you are using an external router, disconnect that and try your streaming or zooming with the router in the gateway only, and make sure you are close enough to it.

 

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SNR 16db.  Ping is 91ms Jitter is 54ms.  Major issue is stuttering on streaming.

D

B2 (primary) and n41 or n71(secondary). Tmobile is constantly changing towers signals etc because of rolling out sprint 5g towers. If there is a sudden change in signal a tower change might have caused it. Try rebooting to see if there is a different tower to go off or moving the router to see if you can pick up another tower. Fortunately the lowest signal I get here is 2 bar and the router switchable to another available band available.

R

We can report that we’ve been suffering from the same serious signal degradation off and on for the last 2-3 months, and it’s really gotten so much worse in the last month, specifically. For the past 2 days, now it’s impacted my ability to work from home in the early morning, which is completely unacceptable. 
 

We’ve had this service since August 2021 and it had been working wonderfully until around the end of this April/early May. During that time, we’ve consistently been affected between the evening hours of 8pm-midnight, especially with our streaming TV service.


I’ve called T-Mobile Customer Support at least 4 different times with no improvement. They’ve replaced our our router, which had no effect. They told me once, after waiting for 6 days for their engineering team to report that we’re in a poor signal area and will encounter service disruptions! What?! They didn’t tell us that when they sold us the service AND that was not our experience during the first 8-9 months of service! 
 

We’re getting completely frustrated with this company’s service that we used to love. We’re pulling out our hair and the company’s responses have been lackluster.

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