Auto switch to different tower when primary tower goes down.

Often, when a tower goes down, the gateway will switch to another band or another tower seamlessly, dynamically. If the 5G equipment goes down on your nearest tower, sometimes the 4G will still be fine, although giving you a much slower speed usually.

However, if your second nearest tower is too far away, you may not connect to it at all, even if your nearest tower is completely down, It helps to know the position of these towers so that, for example, if your nearest tower is to the East, but your next nearest tower is to the West, it will help to pick up that tower by placing the gateway in a window on the West side of your house, if possible.

When you lose connection to the internet completely, the first thing you should do is try to restart the gateway using the button on the side. You probably know this. After pressing it once to turn off, pause for 5 seconds, and then press again to turn it back and wait the two minutes it takes to reconnect.

I’m not sure if the gateway gets more stuck on a certain band or band combination than a cell phone would, but I know for sure that some people when they lose their connection, and patiently waited  3 hours for it to reconnect, they could have reconnected quickly had they just rebooted the gateway immediately, using the method I described above.

Same is true for when a tower that has been down comes up. You might not connect to it, and should try a restart every once in a while.

However, I understand you called up and your tower is down, so rebooting until the cows come home isn't going to help, until the tower is fixed. The phone people never (or very rarely) are aware of how long before the tower will be fixed. They  aren't given that information. I'd say the usual time is one to four days. For some people, it's only a few hours. For others, it's over a month. The phone people can tell only if it is down or up most of the time. Sometimes they know if a tower is scheduled for a 5G upgrade though, as over half of TMO's towers are not yet upgraded, but will be in the coming months.

In my experience, even here on this board, some people -- not you -- are terrible at describing their problem, and also letting the person on the phone know that you have some understanding of how all this works, or no understanding. For example, a question recently on a message board, a person asked how could they tell what speed they get. So you have someone calling up like that, who has never done a speed test, and then you have me, who took a little computer programming 50 years ago when I was in college, more courses later on, and have used computers off and on ever since. It helps if you just kindly tell them your level of understanding.

Also, I think a little empathy is in order when dealing with the phone help, wherever they are from. They don't earn a lot, nor do they set company policy, or have control over how long you had to wait on the phone to get through to them. Try to call in the early morning hours when you get right through, and they'll take their time with you. I'm just writing some of this for the general audience here.

They have to deal with people who call up who are angry, frustrated, upset, inarticulate, sometimes not very intelligent, hard to understand. I'm sure they get together during coffee breaks and talk about their worst customers, and maybe some who were the kindest to them.

You can locate your nearest towers and their positions, although not all towers are always on it, on the online Ookla 5G tower map. It is simple to use by clicking in and the towers are big black and red dots. But first keep left-clicking in to your location.