Home Internet Goes Out Every Couple of Hours

Glad to hear all your problems.  I've been waiting at least two years for the internet. 

Sounds like TMOBILE needs to get their act togeather.

djdeluca wrote:

This is noon Sat., 9/11. This shows a before and after I rebooted the Gateway:

Well, I intended to paste  copies of photos of my internet speed. But apparently this site can't handle it. Before I rebooted it was 0.74. After rebooting it went up to 62.0. An hour later, it is 54.0. Why does this happen? The T-Mobile tower is less than 2 miles from my and a straight line from my window.

Try rotating inch by inch and/or elevating the gateway in your window, even repositioning it side to side a few inches, and and after each position change turning it off and on by the button on the side, each time trying for the highest speed you can get on a speed test. It should take two minutes to reconnect automatically after each restart. The trick is to find a position where you consistently get your highest speeds and avoid a position where you get the unusable speed.

If you have an attic or 2nd floor, that is also worth trying as a gateway location also, but it is very good that you have a window that faces the tower. 

It is normal for speeds to fluctuate on T mobile home internet. I get downloads between 90 and 350, and I'm 5 miles from the tower, but I'm also lucky to have the more desirable n41 instead of n71 signal on the tower. The max speed (if you're less than a block from the tower) is 225 on the n71 whereas the n41 can carry a speed up to 800.

Before I got this, given that my 4G connection here is quite slow, I thought I would be very happy with anything over 30 on 5G. So I know how lucky I am because, obviously, that my lowest speed would be a dream for the people who are getting much less, and sometimes the really low speeds don't even work for people. If you fluctuate down to 1, that means you are very likely to get zero some of the time and have no connection. 

If you want to get the details of what signals you are receiving, whether you are even on 5G, you can see this at the GUI by typing in the following number in your browser’s address box: 192.168.12.1

I bookmark that page, so I can return to it easily.

Select “Status” in the left column, and click on the dropdown arrow to the right of Primary and Secondary, noting the “Band” you are on for each one. 

If you are getting 5G, you  should see a B band in the Primary and a n band in the Secondary signal, because 5G is a non-standalone signal pair, 4G/5G.

If you are getting 4G alone, then you won't have a signal on the Secondary at all, just blanks. That can account for your speed being in the lower range of 50 to 60. 

Selecting in the left-hand column, "Overview," that will show your signal strength on both Primary and Secondary, assuming you're getting both signals, and the drop down arrows near the signals will show data. But just in the basic view of that, you're looking for a gateway placement that shows the most bars on both Primary and Secondary.

You may wonder, if this is a 5G gateway, how is it possible that some people get only the older, slower 4G LTE. Well, some do, because there is something about their house or location that is quirky, and they're not getting the 5G signal.

A minority may actually get a better 4G signal at their house, and that's their faster speed. That's why looking at the GUI is good to know.

Like a cell phone, the gateway switches to towers and band combinations on those towers dynamically. There is no way to lock on to your fastest speed range, other than trying to encourage it by finding the best placement of your gateway.

Don’t be discouraged if you find you are on the n71 instead of the n41, because chances are good that in the next year or two, your tower may get the faster n41, or maybe something even newer and faster that T mobile comes up with. 5G is just in its infancy and improving rapidly.

They should be coming out with a new firmware (software) update that will be pushed out automatically (installs by itself) to your gateway, and that might help some people's speed and/or connection stability. It was due last month but I suspect may be delayed for several weeks. You can see what version you have in the GUI, with "Overview" selected on the left, and by looking at the number near the gateway "Software" the last four digits which will probably be 0178, but the new version is 1609 or higher. I haven't gotten it yet.

This is noon Sat., 9/11. This shows a before and after I rebooted the Gateway:

Well, I intended to paste  copies of photos of my internet speed. But apparently this site can't handle it. Before I rebooted it was 0.74. After rebooting it went up to 62.0. An hour later, it is 54.0. Why does this happen? The T-Mobile tower is less than 2 miles from my and a straight line from my window.

Yes unfortunately like many others I had to return my equipment. I stayed on the waiting list for over a year before I was finally approved. Oddly enough, a week after I return the equipment I got an email telling me that T-Mobile had got it it's wires crossed and I was not actually approved for the equipment. Either way I'll try it again in another year.

Same issues here! Worked great for a month and then completely tanked. Upload speeds and download speeds were great. Now my upload is virtually zero yet downloads are in the 50's. (This is after my reboot that I do every few house). It would be way less frustrating if it was trash from the start. The fact that it was perfect for a few months when I first bought it is what kills me. 

I'll go ahead and add my experience. I signed up last month in hopes that I could replace Xfinity with T-Mobile. I've got great handset signal and performance so I figured the home Internet would as well. I had great speeds up and down. However I did notice some sort of bottlenecking to begin with. I elected to use my TP Link mesh router's and turned off Wi-Fi on the gateway. This helped my situation greatly However I was able to work with Xfinity on a guaranteed 200 down 10 up plan for $50. It just didn't make sense to pay $50 for sometimes great speed but also a lot of buffering especially when Hulu plus live did not work.

Juts started seeing this issue as well. My speeds have dropped off significantly since the first few weeks and I end up losing service and having to restart the modem on a daily basis. 

No help at all. 

Jumping on this bandwagon.  Couple of points:  iPhone7 disconnected from WiFi SpeedTest gets 150+Mbps when on gateway only gets <2Mbps.  Rebooting 5G gateway restores bandwidth to 200Mbps but only temporarily (2 hours best).  Awaiting delivery of my third gateway.  Dismal tech support:  611 IVR doesn't grok "Home Internet Support".  Must use different phone number for home internet.  Clearly offshore staff that is trying to be helpful, but is hobbled by policy and technology.  Most tech support calls are unintelligible due not to language barrier, but woefully inadequate technology… sounds like they are using a wired phone plugged into similar T-Mobile gateway in need of rebooting ;-)

Anyone found a solution for these Internet dropouts? My status screen showed Internet connected but nothing on the home network was working. Rebooting the gateway worked, but where is the issue? The gateway? The towers? Some weird DNS/routing thing?

I don't know if this helps or not, but I've had the white box (4G/LTE ?) for several years and this also has been happening to me for the past several months. I used to get 35-50 speed all the time and now it will be 3-8 until I reboot the box. Then it goes back to 35-50 for awhile. So it's not just the new towers.