TMobile Home internet

You might try adding a fan to see if cooling it down keeps your speeds up.

Hi Bill, you gave all the information I wish more people would give when seeking help with their slow speeds.

It is really strange getting that low a download speed compared to your upload speed. I would have called the service people also. And with your 1 mile clear sight lines from the tower, if you were getting the n41 5G band instead of n71, you should be getting speeds in excess of 100Mpbs on the download, and perhaps as high as 200. That’s something you might inquire further about with T mobile, if they have any plans to upgrade your tower to the n41 band.

I have gotten as high as 190 download and 30 upload and I am 5 miles away from the tower. My average download speed is about 90 though, and lowest I get now is 35 or so. I’m very happy with this, after the slow DSL speeds I was on.

The bands with the prefix of B are the 4G bands, like the B2 you listed, and the 5G band is your n71. And 5G works in a “non stand-alone” relationship with 4G. So you are getting 5G, and that’s the good news. (If you were getting only 4G, you would get a Primary signal alone, with no Secondary “n” signal.)

The bad news is that the newer n41 mid-frequency 5G band is the one you want in your signal pair, rather than the low-frequency n71, because n71 yields a lower range of speeds to begin with, and the fast speed you can get within a block of the tower tends to decrease rapidly with distance, in some cases anyway.

T mobile is gradually replacing the n71 equipment with the faster n41 in many areas. The mid-frequency rights are the ones they acquired from their merger with Sprint and the ones they want to use to spearhead their rollout of 5G. But, yes, they are using n71, too.

So it’s possible you might be stuck with the n71 for a while. I’ve read of a few instances where it happened to people though, just in the last three or four months. That is, their speed increased dramatically one day, and noticed they were getting a Secondary on the n41 band.

As far as I know, they do not put the n71 on the same tower as an n41.

But there are some things you can try now. First, be sure your gateway is within 15 feet of the computer or phone (set on wifi) you are doing the speed testing on, all in the same room. (I used to keep my DSL modem/router about 25 feet away, two rooms away, and it worked fine, but that apparently doesn’t work at all with this gateway. It needs to be close.)

Second, try the gateway in all sorts of locations, doing multiple speed tests at each location. Try puting the gateway below the window sill level, instead of in the window.

I even took my gateway outside, and on the roof (speed was bad), using a portable power supply, but you can also use an extension cord. This is just to see if there is ANYWHERE where you can get a faster speed on a speed test. I know of one person who made a video where he got 20Mbps in his house, max, but on a pole above his roof he got 140Mbps. Being handy, he knew how to cover and insulate it, ventilate it with a fan, and ground it properly. Even so, to anyone going this extreme, you might end up owning the $400 gateway. 

You don’t have to get on the roof, but try it outside if you can, just to see. Or, if you’re getting 5 bars in the window, try opening the window. I don’t know, maybe you have triple pane windows with a coating that blocks the signal. Then again, you’re getting a pretty good upload speed. What is up with that? Does anyone reading this have an idea or experience with what that means?

Also, what you want to do when testing and maybe finding a fast speed location for your gateway, check what bands you are on. You were on the B2/n71 5G combo and maybe another time you get the B66/n71.

Also, you can experiment with trying to connect to different bands by turning the gateway on and off, via the button on the gateway. That reboots it. However, sometimes you just connect to the same bands over and over. The gateway takes a full 2 minutes to reset, but the connection will come on by itself, connecting any devices you may have also. In other words, no need to click on your wifi name and enter a password or anything like that. It knows your wifi name and password after the first time you did it.

On the off chance you have a microwave in operation anywhere near the gateway, this can slow the speed considerably, but less so if you are on a newer computer with the 5Ghz wifi instead of the older 2.4. Still, just thought I mention it. I do a crazy amount of microwaving and noticed that early on. Had to move that farther away when an older computer was being used. 

Well, see if any of this changes anything. It’s worth a try.

Do you have a 5G phone by any chance, or perhaps a friend who is on T mobile with their 5G phone and could test that out at your house, using the cellular signal of course, not the wifi from your gateway? If they got really good speeds from their 5G phone on a T mobile tower, then you would know you might have a problem with your gateway. That might be good to know.

I have only a 4G phone. It can still do tower mapping through the wifi signal on the gateway, telling me what tower I’m connecting to using a tower mapping app.

So try some of this stuff if you can, and get back to us. This might be a mystery that can be solved. Even with the n71, that is still a very slow download speed and something is wrong. Could be a bad modem/router.

I’m editing this because I thought of one more thing. Reading your reply to Jlillard, the hot gateway guy, you got a 20 download at 5am, which is when I tend to get the highest speeds also.

But try doing a test on fast.com, because there’s a weird thing about the gateway that it connects to servers sometimes that are way out of state for the speed test, not that that gives an incorrect speed always, but it might be a good idea to try a different test, just in case. I like alternating between tests anyway.. The Fast.com test only give you the upload speed if you click on the box after doing the download speed for the first time. 

I was doing some reading this afternoon on how cell towers work, as I’m just learning about all this stuff starting last month. I stumbled across some pieces of information which might conceivably account for someone a mile away from a tower not receiving good speed, although since Bill receives between 4 and 5 bars signal strength, and that’s probably a better indicator of cell tower reach to his house than internet speed, then these two things probably don’t apply to his situation.

High signal strength with poor speed usually means interference, either from obstructions or another tower’s signal, or from something like a nearby electrical power station.

Some towers have “directional characteristics,” rather than being completely omnidirectional and transmitting equally in every degree of 360 degrees. So a person’s house might be located in a sort of dead spot, because in that direction there is mostly nothing for miles.

Another possibility is a tower’s power being turned down, so it doesn’t have nearly as much reach as the average tower. This is very common in cities, that a tower gets turned down, when it interferes with the signal from a neighboring tower’s cell (area of coverage). But it can also happen in rural areas for the same reason.

More than a few people who were in the rollout of this T mobile home internet, said they got good speed for a few weeks, or a few months, and then suddenly it dropped off and was really slow. One recent post from a guy in Brooklyn reported that on the second day of use, he got double the speed range of his first day of use. And I’ve read where some people’s speeds got faster through their first weeks or months.

The Nokia gateway that T mobile uses has a maximum power draw of 36 watts. I’ve measured it only up to 25 watts, when it is busy streaming. It idles at 12 watts, like when you are surfing web pages and not using great volumes of data. This gives the gateway an advantage in signal strength over a cell phone, including the best $1000+ 5G phone you can buy. When a phone is very low on battery, it can have trouble reaching a tower that is far away. This gateway shouldn’t have that problem it is plugged into the wall and has 36 watts at its disposal.

Wireless technology is advancing at a feverish pace though.It’s only a matter of time before we all have very fast internet speeds through improved 5G technology. It is only just beginning.

I had great speeds etc until recently.
Now I can only seem to get 4 MB/s.

No matter where I put the device it only seems to get 2-3 bars out of 5.

I’m walking distance from a 5G tower...

So a few questions first. What constituted great speeds for you, on average, and how many bars were you getting when you got those great speeds? For how long were you getting the great speed? Are we talking about this speed drop happening a few hours ago or days ago?

For how long have you been getting this horrible 4Mbps speed?

Have you ever looked at the GUI at 192.168.12.1 selecting Status at the left and clicking on the dropdown arrows to the right of Primary and Secondary, and seeing what bands you are on? If you are only on a Primary band, with no Secondary showing, then that accounts for your snail speed. I have had this snail speed happen to me. But I had it only at first, and for only 5% of the time. I haven’t had it in days and I figured out how to avoid it.

While there is a remote chance they are doing some upgrade on the tower, and put you on some lousy equipment, or shifted you to a tower that is farther away while doing this work, there is also a chance you are connecting to a dreaded 4G-only (Primary signal only) band, that just works terribly compared to your 5G connection.

Forget the signal strength for a moment. I get speeds of up to 190 and I am five miles from the tower, on a two-bar signal strength. To understand why I use a two-bar signal location for my gateway instead of a three, you’ll need to read some of my other posts, which you can find by clicking on my “badge,” the circle with the T in it to the left of this message.

By understanding what bands you are connecting to, using a tower mapper to make sure you aren’t being shifted to a tower farther away from you, you can at least learn a lot of information which might be helpful when contacting a T mobile service person.

If you have a 5G phone or know someone who has one and can try it at your house, then that goes a long way in knowing if it might be a gateway issue. But most of the time, from what I’ve read, it is not a faulty gateway, because the gateway people often get as a replacement will do the same thing.

It has been hot. That’s for sure. If you get nighttime temps that are like a low of 85, the A/C is probably running 24 hours a day. Air conditioning units, I assume even the whole-house ones, can sometimes interfere with a wifi signal if you are anywhere near it. To cover all bases, you might try turning that off for a few minutes and do a speed test.

Another way to test and see if it is anything wifi related instead of cell related, you could try to connect the gateway to your computer using the included CAT 5e cable to the ethernet port. That bypasses the wifi and gives you a direct connection to the modem. My new laptop doesn’t even have an ethernet port, because it’s a netbook.

But your whole house and property might be in a semi-dead zone. That can happen even close to a tower.It’s probably a good idea that you’re trying it for a few more days though, because what if they turned down the power on your tower, or are doing some maintenance, and it just happened to coincide with you getting your equipment, and it’ll be done on Monday.

It’s Monday. Maybe your calls about your poor daytime download speed made them put out a service ticket and they’ll tweak or tune the equipment at the tower. They aren’t going to do that on a weekend. And they might not do it at all if you’re the only person in your area reporting an issue with very slow download speeds.

Your ping and jitter are both fine, quite good. That is not your problem. A person responded to a comment of mine telling me their ping was 800, and their connection is slow and not working right, not even loading a web page.. Well, that’s a problem. Any ping over 150 is bad, but 800 is a disaster.

A reading you haven’t given me can be found in the GUI at 192.168.12.1 and clicking on “Overview” on the left and the dropdown arrow for Primary signal and Secondary signal, and writing down what the SNR is on both.

SNR is Signal to Noise ratio. My signal to noise ratio tends to be around 10db, which isn’t very good. An SNR higher than 25db is desirable.

But since my SNR of 10db works fine for me, I suspect the real problems can happen when you have an SNR of more like 1db to 8db. The NOISE part of signal to noise is the erroneous background transmissions that are emitted from either other devices that are too far away for the signal to be intelligible, or by devices that are inadvertently creating interference on the same frequency.

So when your noise is too much, it interferes with the signal and it lowers your speed or gives you a bad connection.

Well, that is some great SNR! No problem there.

I read an article from PC Magazine four days ago, on the author’s experience with T Mobile Home Internet. I will link it at the bottom. This part, however, made me think that if T mobile has done what they can do on their end, a new gateway could be worth trying.

From the article linked below:

I really struggled with my first month of T-Mobile service. Google and Yahoo web pages would stall out. Video calls kept being interrupted by latency spikes. Sometimes the network would drop out entirely for minutes at a time. When I went looking for more information online, I found many similar complaints from T-Mobile Home Internet customers on Reddit.

I spent a week talking to support techs as they made network-side adjustments that didn't make any difference. Then T-Mobile swapped out my modem and everything got better, so I'm comfortable blaming the hardware rather than T-Mobile's network.

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/t-mobile-home-internet

It’s the same as your problem from Day 1 -- download speed way too low during the daytime.

T mobile basically says that the for the areas that are eligible for their home internet service, they’ve been tested at providing at least 25Mbps download. So you’re getting less than 1/25th that speed if your download is less than 1.

Here’s the statement on speed from their website:

We anticipate some T-Mobile Home Internet customers will see average download speeds in excess of 100 Mbps, and all eligible households will see average download speeds of 25 Mbps or more. Speeds can vary depending on location, signal strength and availability, time of day, and other factors.

Even considering your “average” speed, it is less than 25. And your speed shouldn’t be falling to below 10 at any time of day, no matter the traffic.

When I read back through some older posts on this board, people with the speed problem being very low, under 20, there aren’t a lot of happy endings. But there aren’t a ton of posts about it either. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, for one person 70 was too slow for a download speed. For rural users though, the standard of what we’re used to is much lower.

This is where being an early bird user with problems isn’t good. There aren’t enough people participating on the board who solve their problem with the tower being tuned, getting a gateway replacement, putting their gateway up in the attic, or whatever. Once there are a couple million users, maybe patterns will emerge of what to do when. And as I’ve mentioned, as 5G phone use becomes more common, at least people with 5G phones will be able to test and know when it is a problem with the gateway. That is their phone will have good speed and work fine, but the gateway, when connected to the same tower, has a slower speed or keeps disconnecting on them.

Hi Fred, I’ve moved it all over the house and the present location is the best it’s going to get.

At 5:00 a.m. this morning the ping and jitter were both very low and down and up speeds were

25 Mbps +.  I would be happy with those speeds if they were consistent.  But if you’ve read my previous posts…….by the afternoon things go to hell in a handbasket :(

I’ll wait to speak with tech support when and if they call, but if things don’t improve,then it’s going back,can’t see paying for something that does not work.

This will definitely sound paranoid, but I think T-Mobile is trying to break down my mental health. My gateway device suddenly stopped working on Sep 9th. I was told it was a firmware update that made it so my unit was no longer compatible with the tower. Unfortunately, the agent didn’t confirm my mailing address and they sent the replacement to my old address where I hadn’t lived for a few months. Someone in customer service didn’t update my billing and service address accurately. When I received a second replacement unit, it arrived without a SIM card. I was asked to take the SIM card from the old tower. I have a lot of talents, but this isn’t one of them. I ended up jamming the SIM card and it didn’t work. I received another device, again without a SIM card. I was told to go into a store and get a SIM card. I did that and again, the device still didn’t work. 

If you can believe it, my “customer service experience” and the T-Mobile marketing slogan about caring about their customers has been the opposite of what they advertise as 20 days later I’m still going through this. I went into a local store and the store did a warranty check for the third device I received. The manager concluded I should have a fourth device shipped to the store and I would be notified when it arrived. I received a text from T-Mobile saying they were charging me for the hotspot usage they said they would provide for free given I need internet in order to work. I went to the store for a meeting I thought I had with the manager this morning to discuss billing and alas, they were not there. Too boot, apparently the device arrived and I was not notified.

I’ve been on the phone with T-Mobile for 30-45 minutes everyday since Sep 9th. They’re trying to charge me for hotspot usage they said they were giving me to remedy the situation, and yesterday I found myself in tears over this because I am so genuinely frustrated by all this.  Anyone that has asked me since yesterday how I’m doing learns this story. My work colleague let me know that Verizon might have a better solution with their Jet Pack? I’m going to investigate later today. Any advice? Thoughts? Is anyone else experiencing this insanity?

You will definitely need help in maintaining your mental health. It would be better to get calmerry counseling and it would be online. Which in my opinion is very convenient and you don't have to leave the house.

My internet is off and I'm pissed just paid my bill this is not exceptable and I can't get support teally