I’ve had my home internet for 1 year now. After figuring out how to keep my modem from overheating and finding the best location and orientation in my house, I was routinely getting speed tests of over 400 Mbps. I also rarely had to reboot any more to fix a problem.
A few weeks ago AT&T came into town and started burying fiber in our neighborhood. The following week we had a lot of rain, not bad storms, come through for day. During the rain I happen to notice I was no longer getting those 400+ Mbps speed tests. It was more in the low 100s. I chalked it up to weather interference.
The following week things had dried up but I was still getting slower speeds. it’s still working reliably. It’s just not as fast as it used to be. And it used to be that way for about 9 months. I finally called support this morning. The first rep told me that I was connected to a tower that was northeast of my address but the tower that was southwest of my address was closer. I was aware of this but had purposely positioned it to talk to the northeast tower because the southwest tower did not have 5G. Apparently that has changed.
I got off the phone and moved things around so that I was now connecting to the closer tower. My speed tests did not improve. I called back and the next rep told me there was a contract crew performing maintenance in the area and that there was no current ETA documented for when they would be finished. And, if I understand the rep correctly, traffic was being re-routed around this maintenance.
My speed tests are hitting a suspiciously consistent 120 Mbps. This tells me that I’m hitting an upstream limit. Interestingly, my uploads are now ranging from 60 - 80 Mbps and before I think they were in the 40 - 60 range. Knowing that AT&T is bringing fiber to town, I am wondering if they are doing something that could potentially affect T-Mobile’s tower backhaul so T-Mobile has opted to slow down or maybe re-route home internet traffic during that time period. I asked both reps if I was being limited but no one said that I was.
Has anyone else gone through something similar where speeds were temporarily limited? I can’t imagine this being a permanent setup. When AT&T brings their fiber live, if T-Mobile is still this slow it would be silly not to switch over. I can pay the same amount and get 5 times the bandwidth.
