Question

My home internet gateway locks to B12 despite a good 5G signal which works sometimes.

W
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Looks like I wont be able to stay with TMobile even though it works so well most of the time. It seems like the gateway will just get stuck on B12 with no secondary even though N41 and B2 are strong and nearby.

 

Locking to B12 causes my speeds to go from 600MBPS to 17MBPS. I am positive its not a congestion issue as it will happen in the middle of the night. 

 

Restarting the gateway when its connected to B2 and N71 will reproduce the problem. This is not a tower issue. This is clearly the gateway getting stuck and is reproducible.

 

What a bummer.

 

12 replies

B

I have the exact same issue with the same bands. I have had my service for 2 days with drop of secondary  N41) and shift to B12. It has happened to me in the evening on both days. I don’t believe it is a gateway issue however. The first time it happened I did a soft reset, power off, factory reset, and pulled the sim card. Came back to B12 every time. In my opinion T-mobile is load balancing the towers because of lack of 5G capacity. I challenged customer service and they pretty much said this was the case and they are working on tower upgrades. By the way I am ½ mile from the tower and have full bar service. I have 1G fiber service so I don’t need to keep this. I wanted to try it because I was so close to the tower. Shame because it works well when connected to 5G...

D

I have the exact same problem and I’m about 100 yards from their cell tower. When I first got the gateway tower I could get the secondary signal n41 and got fantastic speeds of over 500Mbps downloads. After it was lost I moved the tower to different windows facing the tower and got it a few more times but now I have not gotten the 5G secondary signal for over 10 days. Very frustrating. Personally, since I can get over 700Mbps on my T-Mobile iPhone 12 consistently, I believe they have a firmware design flaw in the gateway tower since the B12 band is so strong it overlooks the nearly as strong n41 5G band. They need to change their algorithm to accept the n41 band even if it is a little weaker in signal strength. 

N

Had the same problem here and I live a block away from the tower.  Once I was able to get my 5G secondary signal back, I rotated the front of the can counter-clockwise about 120 degrees from the antenna to get the primary signal down while increasing the secondary signal.  Hopefully it doesn’t lock back to only B12 without the secondary signal again.  My secondary signal RSRP is usually around -60 dBm but today is cloudy with light rain but luckily hasn’t switched back to B12.  I also have the can sitting on a usb fan to keep it cool.  I’m on s/w version 178 and hopefully they will fix this problem on the next update.

 

Speed Test

N

Strange how today is still cloudy but now getting RSRP -62 dBm instead about -80 dBm on my secondary signal.   Guess it’s not the weather affecting the RSRP.  Still have the northwest end of the can pointing towards antenna tower.  Did not rotate it and have B2/n71.

 

B

 

Bands B12 (4g lte)  - B2/N41 - tower 0.5 mi away

These are my stats when I have good results. I try to move/rotate the can to keep the Primary SNR down to an indication of 4 bars and between 0-5 db. The secondary is then much stronger with 4 bars but SNR of between 25-35 db. That said the longest duration of maintaining lock on B2/41 is about 3 days. Average about 400 down and 45 up and do a lot of 1080/4k streaming with no issues. I  also have a fan underneath the can and all wifi off except one 2.4 band. I run an ASUS AX-58U wifi 6 router with one AiMesh node to handle the wifi duties. I have 12 various wifi devices connected and use the two hard wired LAN ports out of T-Mobile can out to my ASUS Router and Sony TV. 

 

The best I have been able to figure to this point is it is either a firmware issue or 5G network load balancing that is causing the 5G secondary signal drops. Even though I have taken the So called (over heating issue) with the fan and turning off most of the wifi I am far from convinced that is the main issue.

I have had the service for a month and I can say that other than dropping the 5G band and locking to B12 until I force it back I am quite happy with the results for the cost. I came from AT&T 1G service which was lighting fast and very dependable. As I was so close to a good tower I wanted to give T-Mobile a go and try to support their efforts...so far I am ok with it.

N

Hopefully the next update allows us to choose which bands to lock on instead automatically.  It’s great not having to deal with a cable line so no cable guy to come for repairs.

F

i just found this thread. same issue.

also the wifi was glitch out to. ie turn off. yet still showing.

G

I have the similar issue, but never had a secondary signal, just a B12.  I am a ¼ mile from tower and in 5G Ultra coverage.  I’m getting 100-200 mbps down after a reboot, then after 3-4 hours it falls to 30 mbps down and it will stay there.  If I reboot again, it will go back up to 100-200 then fall back after several hours.  I’m on 178 software version.

S

Having a similar issue where gateway connects to b66/n71 after rebooting, but then connects back to b12 and no secondary. Have tried fans for cooling, but no change. Band b66 actually has a stronger signal strength with 4 bars compared to b12 with 3 bars. So not sure about the theory that the gateway connects to band with higher signal strength. Things worked great for about a month after I setup TM home internet, but then b66/n71 started dropping, which seems strange. Is TM throttling folks using this approach?

On b66/n71 I get 200/70 down/up, but on b12 speeds are 100/8, which is a huge difference on upload.

I

Yup, I am having a similar issue with being locked on to an unwanted band. Normally when this happens I just reset the gateway and it switches to the better band but that doesn’t work anymore. 

My best speed band was B66, was getting up to 352 download and around 100 upload with the secondary n71. I only had a secondary signal usually for 40 minutes at three different times of the day, so when I didn’t have a secondary signal my upload was around 10-20 Mbps. The signal strength for primary goes from 3-4 bars but mostly stays on 3, the secondary is usually 2 but sometimes 3 bars when it happened to show up.

However, my gateway reset itself the other night and I think it must have done some sort of firmware update. Doesn’t matter how many times I reset my gateway my primary signal is now stuck on B2 which never goes above 100 Mbps download and n71 for secondary which gives upload speeds up to 100 Mbps. The strange thing is my primary signal is 3 bars and my secondary signal is 4 bars and has remained so ever since the gateway reset itself. Would be nice to have an option in the T Mobile network overview to switch to the band that you want as your primary and secondary. My current firmware is 1.2101.00.1609

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More and more proof that either the FW or the HW is flawed and does not stay on 5G it loves to just drop to 4G and hang out there.

I have mostly the same issue but slightly diff as my 4G and 5g towers are not in the same location.

But bottom line these gateways just love those B bands no matter what n band you give them.

I

More and more proof that either the FW or the HW is flawed and does not stay on 5G it loves to just drop to 4G and hang out there.

I have mostly the same issue but slightly diff as my 4G and 5g towers are not in the same location.

But bottom line these gateways just love those B bands no matter what n band you give them.

Well if it is a firmware or hardware issue I hope it is resolved quickly. Right after posting this the B2 band went nuts and I am only getting 2 signal bars for primary with 200 ping and 0.85 to 3 Mbps Download 0.04 Upload, never had this bad of a connection before RSRP is all the way up to -116 dBm and it is usually in the lower -80s. I have let it sit for a while before turning it back on a few times but nothing is fixing it.

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