Hello,
After multiples contacts with friendly T-Mobile tech support, I have concluded that I must try something more radical to improve our connection without resorting to external antennas. The best location I have found so far is against a bedroom window, but the aesthetic is not pleasing and the signal is still marginal with sporadic connection losses during rainy conditions and other less clear circumstances that can only be rectified by a gateway restart (and one time it took about an hour to reestablish a connection).
Here are my questions:
- Is it true that a working primary connection is necessary for the secondary connection to be useful… and must the primary be LTE? We have one location in our residence where I get a non-connecting LTE signal on the primary and a good 5G signal on the secondary, and yet it does not work at all. T-Mobile tech support told me that this was normal.
- If I remove the battery and run exclusively off the power adapter, can the device be restarted by cycling the AC power to the adapter? I want position the gateway in the high crawlspace under our roof, close to the highest point and not far from the inside of the roof (which is not metal, of course). I will find a way to rotate the device to adjust the orientation to our towers, but I do not want to be required to take it down should I need to cycle the power.
I actually tried our device on our elevated deck with a thought to encase it in a weatherproof electronics cabinet attached to an outside wall (or just by putting it in a weatherproof storage cabinet made of resin). That is where I experienced case #1 as described above.
Any thoughts from the forum or T-Mobile Home Internet staff who monitor this forum would be appreciated. We are quite pleased with the service when it works, but reliability and robustness of the connection is problematic.
