Forum Discussion
New Arcadyan firmware fixes dropped connections?
I set up our T-Mobile 5G home Internet last week with the new Arcadyan gateway. It was firmware 1.00.12.
The reliability was terrible, we would have to restart it every few hours. We live on a hill in line of sight of the tower about half mile away. Signal is always 4 to 5 bars, excellent, but the gateway would just seem to time out or something and would not let any device connect to the Internet through it. Every time we restarted it it worked perfectly again.
My wife was going crazy that we would have to go back to the cable monopoly because it would suddenly go down during zoom calls for work, streaming TV, when the kids woke up every single morning there was no Internet. Yet when we would restart it it would work perfectly a minute later. People talk about the gateways overheating or needing external antennas or what not, but it merely seemed like the gateway needed a refreshed connection to the tower. That is to say, T-Mobile needed to reprogram how the gateways stay connected to the towers.
Yesterday we got firmware update 1.00.16. No new features that I can see but it seems like they did some stability fixes to change how it connects with the tower signals. Because we have been online for 36 hours straight without a single glitch! Fingers crossed that this will hold because we're in a great location for wireless home Internet and it is much cheaper than the cable monopoly and 2 to 4 times faster.
I suspect it had something to do with switching between bands or switching between 5G and 4G LTE. Maybe something in how devices are prioritized for tower access. Whatever it is I just want to be able to stay connected for longer than a few hours. I don't care if it's 50 mbps down or the 100 we usually get or the 200 we occasionally get. Even restarting it once or twice a week for the long-haul would be acceptable.
Just got same about 8h ago and seen noticeable speed improvement, no stability issue before nor since update. Some tips old/new re: gateway placement with unexpected benefit (for me YMMV)…
- rotate/test in small increments, or at least try facing left-side (when viewing LCD) toward tower.
- place near window [genius right 😂] …
- thinking shear curtains (doubled), non-metallic awning or tinted window film will address direct sunlight (heat) concern;
- remove metal window screen (perhaps swap for plastic). Definite albeit limited (15%?) speed-bump for me!!!
All the talk about window placement and 1 smart soul (not me) mentioned this last point. With signal stability thinking it's similar to poor reception on digital OTA TV, drop below threshold = nothing/no signal, whereas with analog = picture tho fuzzy. Point being even a small 10-15% stronger signal may mean the difference between stable connection & frequent drops. HTH.
I just signed up a couple weeks ago. Arcadyan Gateway. By 2 towers (less then a 1/4 mile) 4 bars on display and app. Unit has 1.00.16 firmware. Daily loss of internet, unable to reach Gateway via app. Eventually comes back or we reboot it out of frustration. Awaiting a replacement. Was on AT&T 1GB fiber.....not feeling good about leaving right now.
Daybreak wrote:
I just signed up a couple weeks ago. Arcadyan Gateway. By 2 towers (less then a 1/4 mile) 4 bars on display and app. Unit has 1.00.16 firmware. Daily loss of internet, unable to reach Gateway via app. Eventually comes back or we reboot it out of frustration. Awaiting a replacement. Was on AT&T 1GB fiber.....not feeling good about leaving right now.
You gave up 1 gig fiber for this? never ...
It's been four months now and we are much more stable. Somewhat up and down with speeds, but only getting sluggish and needing to reset once or twice a week. It sometimes gets overwhelmed with streaming TV or zoom meetings, but mostly OK.
As you can tell though, this is still relatively unstable and prone to get sluggish at inconvenient times. If you are directly comparing this to 1G fiber service you had before, this will seem like the dark ages. And it may be better in a year or so, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that.
