5G Internet Showing Incorrect Location

The fault really lies with content providers that rely solely upon third party IP-address based geolocation services to determine location for local channels delivered. IP-addresses say nothing about your physical location other than your country and who owns the IP-address block. IP-address based geolocation services have been inherently inaccurate but worked well with traditional wire-line based services due to the manner in which those carriers assigned IP-addresses by region. Mobile Carriers  (with an emphasis on the mobile) don't have that luxury. Neither do satellite internet providers where your point of presence is thousands of miles away at a Gateway typically.

Nevertheless. some content providers have figured out how to properly address location and provide more flexible mechanisms to endure the proper home location. YouTube TV stands out as a prime example of this. FUBO, Hulu and other that rely on third party IP-address  based geolocation services should follow YoutTube TV's lead.  

@syaoran  provides the short form answer.

Here is more information to help the Community and hopefully to encourage TMO to fix this. I subscribed to TMO Home Internet 5G about 90 days ago. I have the latest and greatest Gateway device (black box). The service is extremely good. Very good upload, download and latency performance. Better than Spectrum Cable that I dropped. However, I too have a major geo-location headache. The Gateway does not have onboard GPS and does not provide proper geo-location information. I live near Raleigh, NC. My connections are to a tower less than a mile from my home. The connection is routed over high-speed fiber to a hub in Charlotte, NC (Some 3 hours travel away from my home). This means that DHCP assigns me a Charlotte IP address. Hence all web sites and web content providers think I live in Charlotte. YouTubeTV, local stations, weather, mapping software, big-box store locations, everything is out of sync with my real life. YouTubeTV actually cut off my service because they think I'm using the service for too long away from my home location. I have discussed this issue with TMO customer service. They were honest enough to explain and confirm why I'm showing up with a Charlotte IP address. They made no promises to fix it now or at any time in the future. I told them that this is so disruptive to basic internet usage that it is a deal breaker. I like TMO pricing, but the pain level inflicted by this geo-location fail is too much. At this point, I am receiving almost daily offers for internet service from Spectrum at the introductory rate of $49 / Mo. (for 12 months). Since this is basically the same rate that TMO charges, it looks like a better service option because there is no geo-location problem with Spectrum. The only reason I have not switched back to Spectrum is that I hate all the silly pricing games Spectrum plays and generally poor customer service they provide. But Hey, if TMO can't or won't provide a proper service or a work around, then that is not good customer service either. All TMO needs to do is look at customer billing addresses to determine a customers home location and grab IP addresses from the correct IP address pool on that basis for all connections. I'm not an IT/Network Engineer, but it seems to me that they could fix this in software if they really want to be the viable home internet provider they advertise to be. Right now they are just turning off customers who may never trust them again. You know what we say, "Trick me once, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me". TMO, I hope you are reading this. I want to support you, but you have to do better. And I know you already know this. Right now, push out a notification to users telling us that you are fixing this and when to expect it to be done. Not sure how much longer I can tolerate this broken system. Thanks in advance for getting this done!

What a cop out of an answer.  T-Mobile's product is defective.  It changes all time time.  Today, it is saying that i am 278 miles from where I am located.  FIX THIS

When a company sells home internet, I expect it to be like every other home internet. It's not really my concern that "oh well that's just the way it works". Like others have said, we rely on accurate location services. If T-Mobile can't provide that, they should stop selling these devices until they get the issue figured out and refund all the people that have wasted their time on this.

Hey MikeJoe7g. Thanks for sharing. Your conclusion is probably right. Which means that I will probably be going back to Spectrum in Raleigh, NC soon. At least for 12 months, or until their promotion runs out. Then maybe back to TMO long enough to make Spectrum miss me again. Stupid games they play!

One thing that you might like to know about YouTubeTV is that you can override the false geo-location provided by your ISP to reset and restore your account to your actual home location so you get the right channels and more on YouTubeTV. YouTubeTV allows you to use your phone's GPS to determine your actual location. This works because your phone has GPS and knows your real location unless you have turned off location services. How you do it varies somewhat depending on what device you use to access YouTubeTV, but the method involves going into your profile settings in the YouTubeTV client (for me that is usually on an Amazon FireStickTV) and choosing to set your current location. Then select use my device which will be your phone. At the same time you do that you will need to be in the YouTubeTV app on your phone, in settings, and select to set my current location. Then your proper location will be set on both devices. A YouTubeTV rep taught me this. Of course this won't get the desired result if you and your phone are not in your home (base) location. I'm not sure how long this location reset will last in the YouTubeTV account as TMO's false geo-location data may override that at some point. Time will tell on that, but it did let me reset my YouTubeTV account and restore my service to my local channels that I want to see. With YouTubeTV you can use the service when you travel out of base for something like 90 days (but don't quote me on that as I'm just going from memory) before you must use your service in your base or lose access. So this is just a work around for YouTubeTV and not the real fix that TMO should provide their Home Internet 5G customers as I stated in my last post. I do hope this information will be useful to you MikeJoe7G and the Community at large.

This could be fixed but T-Mobile does not want to spend the time to do it.

Each home router has a MAC address and all they need to do is assign that MAC address and static IP that is assign to that tower.

I have worked in IT / networking for 30 years, so them saying it can’t be done is BS and frustrating.

The channels you receive is based on your IP address.  Because your IP is being issued 50 miles away.  I doubt Fubo will be able to do anything about that.  

Guppy_puppy wrote:

When a company sells home internet, I expect it to be like every other home internet.

Unfortunately  life is not that simple. For instance, T-Mobile's Home Internet does not have an inbound IPv4 address and it's highly firewalled; meaning you can't run a web or VPN server on this ISP. It's really like saying that you expect one car to work like every other car, then you buy a Tesla and get angry because there's no place to fill it with gasoline.

I considered all the pros and cons and got AT&T Fiber Internet because I run a VPN server.

Allcalcio wrote:

...YouTubeTV actually cut off my service because they think I’m using the service for too long away from my home location…

I'm not using YouTubeTV yet but I am considering it.  I was not aware the IP geolocation could be that big a problem.  Thank you for mentioning it.  

Fortunately, I did not cancel Spectrum before trying T-Mobile.  My plan was, and continues to be, to see how well T-Mobile works before committing to go all the way.  This means switching involves turning the gateway off and the Spectrum router on.  The biggest hassles is switching my printer manually every time because it can remember only one network at a time.  I've continued experimenting because thanks to Long Covid, I am no shape to drive to the nearest T-Mobile store and return the gateway.  So I keep giving it a chance before inevitably throwing the switches to get back to Spectrum when I can no longer endure the internet thinking I am at least I am 100 miles from where I really am.  (There were times when it showed me in Chicago or California.  I live in New York State.)

In addition to the geolocation issue, T-Mobile is slower than Spectrum where I live, but otherwise works well.  I am using the 5G home gateway to post this message while '80s music is playing on my phone's SiriusXM app.  I have used the gateway for dozens of Zoom calls into hybrid martial arts classes.  While connecting to the call can take a little longer than Spectrum, it has worked well for the calls.  The calls themselves are IPv4, so credit to the 464XLAT/NAT64 tunnel to make those connections.  For internet connectivity, the gateway usually works well.  There is just this one issue that, like you, I have trouble getting past.  Furthermore, I did searches to see if the 5G home gateways offered by Verizon and AT&T have the same geolocation issue and, apparently, they do.  

The underlying problem (which also applies to AT&T and Verizon) is T-Mobile is primarily a cell phone provider.  While the 5G home gateways have attracted enough customers for Spectrum to make commercials against it by name, this is still something TMO does on the side.  If they lose some customers to the geolocation issue, it won't affect the company's bottom line, At the same time, it seems the home service has brought in enough money for them to keep doing it for years, through several models of gateways. 

WRT providers like YouYubeTV, there probably aren't enough 5G home internet users for content providers to adapt how they determine user locations to users with IPSs that use a variation of CGNAT that makes accurately determining the location impossible if the user is not living in the same city as the hub they are going through.  They will probably not change to accommodate us when the majority of users are probably on cable. 

All of which is my long-winded way of saying the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.  And while there are valid reasons for it, that doesn't mean the situation and TMO's lack of action is any less vexing.