Sudden terrible (and strange) data speeds at home, TMo Tells me the towers are "fine"

Part1of2 wrote:

One thing to add that I thought about for my situation is that the only thing different about the device for which the speedtests recently posted is that it was a brand new device on the network and on that tower. That was the first day I turned it on and ran those speedtests that day, but then didn't again until nearly 2 weeks later. Is it possible that the tower overall is throttled in general for everyone due to capacity issues but that this device, since it was new, was sort of allowed free reign until something kicked in to throttle the IMEI? Part of me thinks that seems far-fetched, but then part of me is like..absolutely carriers could do this. idk what to think at this point. I really have no choice but to keep pushing until something happens I guess. 

Yours appears to be more of “it was good until a certain date for all devices at 1 location, 24x7”, which typically indicates something local or between the tower and upstream.

formercanuck wrote:

Part1of2 wrote:

One thing to add that I thought about for my situation is that the only thing different about the device for which the speedtests recently posted is that it was a brand new device on the network and on that tower. That was the first day I turned it on and ran those speedtests that day, but then didn't again until nearly 2 weeks later. Is it possible that the tower overall is throttled in general for everyone due to capacity issues but that this device, since it was new, was sort of allowed free reign until something kicked in to throttle the IMEI? Part of me thinks that seems far-fetched, but then part of me is like..absolutely carriers could do this. idk what to think at this point. I really have no choice but to keep pushing until something happens I guess. 

Yours appears to be more of “it was good until a certain date for all devices at 1 location, 24x7”, which typically indicates something local or between the tower and upstream.

Yep, someone else contacted me via X this morning and I think it may actually be going a little further. I was told they did discover that there was some sort of backhaul issue and I think they are going to have an actual real live person go out there. I'll believe it when I see it, but they are basically still only telling me something I already know! Had I not been as super persistent, who knows how long I and my entire community around me would have to deal with such crap service.

Sadly, the more ‘rural’ coverage, the less important that T-Mobile sees it.

Eg.  When T-Mobile had an outage for 8 hours in Cambria (power), it took 2 weeks to find out and their response was ‘the generator was broken’, while AT&T and Verizon had backups .

When there’s an issue around LAX, or a busy urban area .. its fixed VERY quickly.

Ironically, YEARS ago, when T-Mobile was upgrading local sites (adding LTE B12), my area turned into a near dead zone, as everything was preferring B12 LTE, and not handing off.  I suspect that local teams were in the area checking service with the updates, as I had them check and send a map of a drive test within a few hours.  Similarly, spoke with them on the phone, and they dropped the handoff down from ~-120dBm to ~-116dBm, which allowed for handoffs.

Unfortunately, that was years ago.  Now its more of file a ticket … wait, and have some generic excuse of "Network is working as expected" … which only means IDK WTF it is , but my equipment isn't complaining or down.

TBH, even with my work phone on AT&T, their corporate response isn’t much better.

I'm not sure how far the site is away from my house but the one thing I do know is during the day I don't go above three or four megs of bandwidth at all okay and I see all people all the time reporting 20 30 40 50 megs. All I know is is I'm getting tired of paying the $50 a month on paying for that kind of bandwidth during the day I've got another company sending me out a device that uses cell towers too for internet and they promise me a faster internet than what I'm getting right now at T-Mobile and I'm going to get 7 days to try it and if it works then I'm sitting down T-Mobile if not I don't know what I'm going to do I'm almost tempted to go back to cricket because when I was signed up with cricket I had a mobile hotspot yeah it wasn't the greatest mobile hotspot because it always had a type 3 connection and I could never get it off no matter what I did static IP and run it through a router open ports you know I did everything possibly I could to change that from type 3 to 2 and never did so they gave me connectivity issue but I would always get anywhere from 25 to 50 megs of bandwidth with it. Honestly I think it's just the luck I have lol. I want to thank all of you for your for your insight suggestions and advice I'm going to take it all under advisement but when it comes down to is I can get rid of my home internet and still have that kind of bandwidth on my console PC connecting through the hotspot on my phone or my cell phone and not have an extra bill the whole purpose of having that home internet package was supposed to get you know the 20 plus consistently in reliably and so far going on five six months now that it has yet to deliver

I can't believe it, but I think I actually got them to fix a problem. It shouldn't have been this hard, but I'll take it. 

As I mentioned earlier, on X, I got a response that they were going to have someone take a look at it. Like a real live person checking the problem out. Somewhere between 6:00-6:30PM this evening, things got back to normal. These speeds are actually great for the area and I'll take it! 

Interestingly enough, you can see where the download and upload completely flipped around 6:00PM (Green is Download and Yellow is Upload). Now, I am very curious as to what the problem actually was! I am cautiously optimistic, but time will tell. Thanks to those of you who basically agreed with me and allowed me to gripe and the suggestions. 

Good to hear.   Unfortunately, in some areas, it takes some persistence, and I still doubt that T-Mobile has a good support plan since its expansion/deployment into rural areas.  The vast majority of their sites/customers are in urban areas, but by contrast, a handful of sites in less urban areas cause a lot of issues for a larger area.  If the coverage, and performance is good - that's great.  Now to work on reliability and items like generators.  Of course, that will cost them $$$.  Since the biggest number of customers are urban (and potential customers), they typically focus on it.

This is a neverending issues of failure to provide contracted service. It's time we organized and sent them to regulating agencies for consumer protection. Im tired of being lied to and never having this issue of timed out data requests and who knows what else. They have clearly oversold the network and it's getting worse and worse. It's like having an AOL DIALUP ACCOUNT circa 1998. Tmobile is like Bell of old and needs to be broken up and investigated for antitrust and fraudulant service.

I'm having the same issues.  My T-Mobile gateway always has 5G and at least four bars - sometimes five - and yet my speed will go from 180gbs to 0.1 gps in a heartbeat.  I really don't want to have to switch back to cable internet from Xfinity, but I guess I'm going to have to do that, as the horrible inconsistencies of T-Mobile make it unusable.  Sad!

My 5g home internet has been very good for months getting "good" signal with average download speed 150 mbps or better and upload of @10 mbps most of the time using n41 band. Lately I've been getting mostly "weak" signals with download speeds often below 100 mbps and uploads under 3 mbps. I have changed nothing. My gateway has not been moved. I have not gone above T-Mobile's throttling cap of 1.2 tb in any month. ¿Qué sucede?