Good signal/bars but no network connection many times daily

Cali Cat wrote:

It looks like most of the folks having this issue (phone and/or home internet) are describing when the cell towers are overloaded with more connections then it can manage. The symptoms are:

• Strong signal but low or no data
• Strong signal but dropped calls
• Restarting your device gives you a brief moment when data works again only to lose it. This is caused by your restart putting your device back to top of the data queue momentarily.

I experience this a lot in both dense cities and remote areas. A good example is a vacation spot. Go during the week and no problems. Go during the weekends and your same phone from the same spot gets little to no data even though the signal strengths is the same as the week.

Unfortunately, the "fix" is for TMO to upgrade such towers and they are. However, they can only upgrade so many on a given day and nobody can tell you when your area will be upgraded. TMO want's to add more capacity so they can bring in more customers. I'm sure the TMO exec is accurately aware that continued overloading will drive customers to other carriers.

Found the same symptoms through trial and error in an ex-urban / rural area (including vacation in a dense city last week) .  My wife's older phone works flawlessly on 4G (LTE?), but my newer phone on 5G cannot make or receive calls reliably 5 minutes after a reboot.  I have to switch phone settings back to where I am on an Edge tower to reliably make and receive phone calls.  

Thank you for the explanation.  The "Largest 5G Network" is not quite rolled out to my neck of the woods.  Wish my phone and/ or the towers would auto negotiate down so I could do normal stuff I've expected to "just work" for the last 8 years.