So, several years ago I had to get a T-Mobile personal 4g LTE CellSpot to hook up to my internet router because the cell signal inside mu house is terrible. At the time, I was told this would not be an issue in the future as towers in the area were being upgraded.
Recently, I ordered T-mobile Home Internet. After I hooked it up, I was getting terrible speed. The issue was largely due to the fact I still had my Frontier router hooked up, so I shut it down. This also shut down the Personal CellSpot.
What was happening is the T-Mobile gateway was picking up the signal from the personal cellspot.
When I shut down the frontier router and cellspot the gateway went from using B66 to B71 and I was getting 22 to 30 MBPS.
There is no way to hook up the cellspot and, surprise, those tower upgrades have never happened. The T-mobile map shows my area as 5G Extended. It turns out that is not 100% accurate. The signals in my area - both the 5G and 4G LTE - are not strong enought to penetrate buildings (this is according to a T-mobile tech rep).
So, if I plug in and start using my old frontier router, I can hook up the cellspot and get good phone reception…..but horrible internet speed.
If I leave the Frontier router disconnected and therefore do not have the cellspot, I get decent internet speed (considering I am in a rural area) but my phone becomes useless…...dropped calls, calls going direct to VM etc.
T-mobile has a lot of bugs yet to iron out and, sadly, they are in no way equioed to handle the issues their system runs into outside of urban settings.
