Serious software bug in activation process for Home Internet model TM0-G4AR

I am a retired software engineer, and as best I understand it, the setup process for T-Mobile’s Home Internet has a serious bug.

Here is *where* I think the error occurs during the setup process.  You have scanned the QR code and the device is recognized.  You probably already have an internet signal. But if for some reason the setup software cannot connect your mobile phone (on which the T-Mobile Home Internet app is running), it then asks you do this connection to the SSID manually. If there is some glitch in manually connecting your phone to the Home Internet device at that point, the setup will NEVER complete properly. Why? The next step in the setup process is to change the administrator password, and because of this glitch, the admin password is never changed.  So you may think you have a completely setup internet. Why? Because you may have a good internet signal so everything looks hunky dory. Run Ookla speed tests and they come back with great numbers!

But at some point, when you try to connect as an administrator, the Home Internet software thinks because you have not changed the admin password that you MUST do a from scratch setup.

This is what happened to me.  I went to connect as admin and could not. Instead, I was told that I must perform a setup.

My router firmware was all up to date when this happened.  A guy at T-mobile told me that if this happened again, I would have to get a new device. It happened. Again and again again.

Well, I got a new device, ejected the sim card out of the old device and after a totally useless experience with T-mobile online resources and their “experts”, figured it out myself, and installed my sim card in the new router.

I did the setup on the new device. Same problem all over. I "set it up" but never saw a step to change the admin password. When I tried to connect to the device, the T-mobile software demanded I do a new setup from scratch, throwing everything away.

On my n-th attempt, after I manually connected my mobile phone to the router, the T-Mobile Home Internet software returned me to the *next* step: changing the password of the admin.  This is the step that I never got to before.  As soon as I changed the admin password, I had finished all the steps and everything seemed fine.  To test this, I tried to log in as the admin, and bingo, it finally all worked. Now I could connect as admin because the setup process had completed. 

I do not believe for a minute that there was a hardware problem with my first device or my second. Instead, it was a software problem. You can call it a firmware problem if you prefer.  

I think the designers of the setup software NEVER considered what should happen if a critical step, like a mobile phone not connecting to the router, failed.  Instead, because they never considered failure, once you hit a failure like that, you are pretty much screwed.  Because the admin password did not get changed, the setup is incomplete, and must be redone from scratch.

¡Caramba!

I still do not know what I did differently on my n-th attempt to connect my phone via settings to my new T-Mobile Home Internet SSID. But I think some difference in my user behavior allowed control to return to the next step in the setup process…. finally! 

This has been a huge waste of my time all because of sloppy software that was never properly tested, and was not designed to handle failures in the setup steps.  So since the software is *fragile*, when it fails, the whole setup is messed up and you have to start all over again. If this keeps up, like it did with me, you start feeling like you are an infinite loop of setup failure.

Oh, my mobile phone is an Android. Somehow I figure Apple users never had this setup problem.

T-mobile: my advice is to hire software engineers who understand the importance of *resilience* in software, particularly during the all critical setup process for consumer devices.  Yeah, you may have to pay a lot more for such engineers, but don't be stingy. 

So instead of an easy 5 minute setup process for my Home Internet device, I got a nightmare. Thanks T-mobile!