Disable secondary (5G) connection

magenta10597872 wrote:

When the Home Internet router connects to the secondary which is n71 band, I get horrible service. When the router is using only the primary, the service is good. Is there any way to disable the 5G connection?

 

It's strange that my 5G phone has excellent data speeds whilst the router is terrible. Perhaps it's using a different band?

It is strange that you want to block your secondary signal.  Most want it to increase their speeds:

You might try using tin foil to either force a switch to another 5G band, or maybe block the 5G altogether as shown in the following YouTube video:

magenta10597872 wrote:

When the Home Internet router connects to the secondary which is n71 band, I get horrible service. When the router is using only the primary, the service is good. Is there any way to disable the 5G connection?

It's strange that my 5G phone has excellent data speeds whilst the router is terrible. Perhaps it's using a different band?

I do not know a way of disabling the 5G connection on your home internet gateway, but if you were using T mobile's earlier model 4G modem/router, that would disable it. If I were you, I'd try some more tricks, some simple things you can do. While it is true some people can get a faster connection on 4G, the majority get a 2x speed on 5G, just as your 5G phone works so well.

While it is true that some model phones in particular have great 5G receivers/antennas on board, the only reason I can think of that is obvious that your 5G phone works so much better than the home gateway is in some areas, cell phones are given priority signals over the home internet gateway, but that should be only during peak traffic hours, not all the time that I know of.

I just got my first 4G smartphone last month, and the home internet last week, so even though I’ve used computers for 50 years, I’m kind of a smartphone ignoramus, but I’ve been reading about it furiously for a few weeks now.

If you knew that your 5G phone is connected to certain bands (or primary band only in the case of 4G), I would feel more confident about recommending that you try different gateway placement -- up high, down low, in the basement, whatever you can think of. Ignore the bars (signal strength) and try different placements doing speed tests. In a window toward the tower.

If you are, let's say 2 miles away from one tower, and 3 miles away from another, those towers are close enough that it's possible your phone is connecting to the better tower, and the gateway is not. Yet if you put the gateway in a window nearer to that better tower, then the speed might change.

The n71 band is T-mobile’s low frequency, high range (reaches dozens of miles) 5G band which is paired with a 4G primary in their non stand-alone relationship which is the current state of 5G, It is my understanding that T-mobile is replacing some of the 5G n71 band equipment with the newer mid-frequency 5G band n41.

The n71 band doesn’t have as high a speed range as the mid-frequency and high-frequency (mmWave) bands, and but it can be fast when you are very close to the tower. 

If you didn’t have the 5G phone getting such good 5G speeds, I would say in some weeks you can probably expect you might be getting a n41 signal with considerable improvement.

If you tell me what model phone you’re using, well, iphone or android, I can find a free app for you to download that can tell you your bands and tower locations.

I have to go out this morning, but ordinarily I’m around a lot.

Also when posting here, just for my education, it would be helpful to know what average download speed people consider bad, good or excellent.For some people good is 30 and for others good is 300. It's just helpful to know what speed range you're in. Also, if you know how far the tower(s) are from you. Lastly, signal strength, either as in the GUI or on the top of the gateway is good to know, because these things behave differently at different signal strengths.

I was hoping there were some more additions to this thread to keep it alive but, seeing none, I thought I would add my current situation. 

A couple of weeks ago I somehow started receiving Band n71 on my Nokia 5G router and my service went into the trash. Poor connectivity, dropped connections, huge latency, jitter and packet loss. Before it switched, I would get between 65 and 100 MB/sec download speeds, now I'm lucky to be getting in the 20's. Sometimes in upload tests, I get sub 1 MB/sec speeds and a lot of times the test will terminate because of lost connectivity.

Spent over an hour with T-Mobile Tech support (first tier) and she tried to force my connection to a tower that only had 4G. She was able to get it to connect for a little while and I was getting pre-5G speeds (+100MB/sec) but it somehow switched back to a tower that also has 5G and the router will prioritize the connection over to 5G, even though it sucks. 

Here is the different signal strengths between 4G and 5G:

4G: RSRP: -95dbm, RSRQ: -7db. (3bars)

5G: RSRP: -106dbm, RSRQ: -15db (2bars)

Hopefully I can get this issue escalated and somehow turnoff the 5G radio or premaritally connect my router to the site that only has 4G. Right now, since my iPhone is configured for WI-FI Calling, it is unusable while the the router is on 5G. 

My router is currently running firmware version 1.2101.00.1609. Anyone know when this version was pushed to the field?

Eric

Eric_S wrote:

 

My router is currently running firmware version 1.2101.00.1609. Anyone know when this version was pushed to the field?

Eric

People got 1609 over a month ago. If your problem started just a few weeks ago, it probably has nothing to do with the update.

You can request they send you a white box 4G modem/router. They probably have warehouse full of them after most people exchanged them for the 5G model.

I assume you've tried various placements with the gateway, since one might promote getting the 4G signal. The gateway can also be rotated and restarted, to see if you are more likely to get a faster connection that way.

I would also like to disable 5G on my Home Internet router.  

Daily at approximately 2:45pm (school dismissal), I begin to see high latency and packet loss when my router's secondary (5g) connection is up.  For the last several days, my secondary has been down, and my Internet performance and reliability has been drastically improved.  

I noticed yesterday that my Internet performance is suffering again, and to my disappointment my 5g connection is back online.  

There's no way that I have found to administratively disable the secondary connection?  If there's not, is there an appeal that I can make to T-Mobile to have my router's 5g connection disabled?

I made, and attached, a PDF that I made from investigating the router. I found if I rotate the router so the 5G-3 and 5G-4 antennas are facing the direction of the tower I can improve the signal by ~4-5 dBm and improve the SNR. If the signal to noise is improved that is important for performance. I found a slight rotation of even 3-5 degrees can have an impact on the signal. It is worth the time to try to improve the 5G signal. If you want to get serious go to waveform.com and check out the external antennas. They can probably set you up with the 4x4 log periodic and that would have a positive impact. Not cheap but smart.

If you know where the tower is great. If not then get the PCI value for the cell and use cellmapper.net to locate the 5G tower. If you call T-Mobile they should be able to provide you with coordinates of the tower so you can improve the cellular link. 

My router runs 1.2103.00.0338 code and took that a week or so ago. I recall reading that the router will take an update if it is rebooted. I asked about getting the code to update it but was told that was not how it was done. I may be wrong but I believe the information I read suggested T-Mobile will push the update and the router has to be rebooted to take it. I have run the Nokia router on n71 on the secondary signal since January. I have a 5.3 mile distance to the tower and I get RSRP -80 dBm with a SNR 22 dB and RSRQ -11 dB. I have seen the 5G improve a few dBm (-75 dBm) but that is when the air is clear and conditions are best. I took focus on the 5G signal improvement and let the 4G LTE primary signal be whatever it is. The 4G LTE is never as good as the n71 5G signal and does not have the performance I can get out of the 5G signal. That is my experience at any rate.