Question

Why has service been degrading in Lovettsville, VA?

  • 23 February 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 195 views

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We’ve been on T-mobile home internet for over a year and for the most part it’s been a great service for rural internet compared to other options.  There have been some occasional performance issues, generally due to periodic service issues & upgrades at specific towers and historically these have been resolved in a timely manner with reasonable expectation setting.

The last two months have been horrible and getting progressively worse by the day.  At this point the connection is basically unusable.  Just to give a picture of the performance range, I ran a speedtest just now and got 11M down (11:29 PM), an hour ago I got 0.27M down, which is what I experience during the working day.  Three weeks ago I was getting 90M download speeds in off hours and for the past several months have been getting 28M - 45M during the day, which for me was stellar performance. It looks to me like the upgrades have been working, but there’s a problem that got introduced starting a couple months ago.

As I work from home I now have to call into meetings with my Verizon Cell phone and hope that I’ll see the screenshare my computer.  A few weeks ago this was a disruption a couple times a day.  Now the Home Internet is pretty much useless during productive hours in the day.

To top it off, the customer support has been abysmal and I’ve spent hours and hours going through the same troubleshooting steps that I know don’t work and then they give up and the problem isn’t resolved.  Sometimes they escalate to engineering, but I never hear back and the ticket is summarily closed without solving the issue.  This has been going on for a couple months and every time I call in the team is exceedingly appreciative and willing to take ownership, but there is not follow-through and trying to escalate is met with deflection.  It’s just words, but no action.  Horrible customer service and an insulting use of my time.

Anyone else have this issue? 

 


5 replies

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Also, I can’t pin down the timing definitively, but T-Mobile stood up a new tower on Snider Lane, Loudoun County, Virginia, 20132, United States fairly recently.  According to Cellmapper.com Band 66 (Cell ID 14167810) has a strong coverage area well beyond my house, but the reported bandwidth is low.

I can’t correlate this new tower specifically as I don’t have the timing of when it was put into service, but I have a strong suspicion that there are implementation problems with it.  When I load speedtest it often connects to Massachusetts, which is quite a distance from Loudoun County (Hub of the Internet).

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This is not normal!!!  T-Mobile can you please take a look at the Snider Lane tower?

 

 

Check out these ping times and packet loss:

 

 

Hope you get an answer because we are in the same boat as you.  We used to hit 100mb late evening into off hours and consistently 30 or more during the day.  I suspect over saturation of our area.  It would be great if a new tower or  two would be allowed in our area, but they are strongly opposed.  

Forgot to mention, we are in Lovettsville south of the Town Center. 

Yes same for me. 6mi south of Lovettsville, the wifi service wanes early in the morning, then again in the early evening...some days it is intermittent connectivity all day long so you cannot stay connected to anything, especially if trying to pay bills or other secure activities (mobile banking, etc.). Trying to stay connected and work from home with Teams or Webex calls is also a joke on those days.  I just called T-Mobile support (wifi is again funky for the last three days), and customer support said she couldn’t even tell what tower I’m connected to because it wouldn’t ping back or something...so she sent it over to Tech support. Are these wind/weather events in Northern VA tearing up the cells? Or is there some home station that the wifi connects to (like a substation) that is North of us, and is out of service from the snow?

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