Forum Discussion
Strange connection problems with T-Mobile
Since I changed from Spectrum internet to T-Mobile I have noticed a few issues. The first one being for some reason my 5Ghz wireless does not show up on my ROKU devices that did work at 5 GHz with Spectrum, and 5Ghz does show up on up on most other devices. My wireless Brother printer will not successfully connect wirelessly on 2.4 Ghz. I had to take net cable from the gateway to another router and it was able to connect to the lan connected router wirelessly on 2.4Ghz. The most important issues are cameras that worked fine remotely on Spectrum no longer work with T-mobile cameras unless they are operated locally on the same network as the app.
Mike, you might have devices that are unable to see WPS2/WPA3 security. Here's something that might fix your problem.
Launch the T-Mobile Home Internet app on your phone, the same app you used during setup. Tap the network tab on the bottom of the screen. Tap the "+" sign on the bottom right. Create a new network and choose 2.4 MHz as the frequency band and WPA/WPA2 as the WPA version. Be sure and give it a name (SSID) that is different than your primary network and make sure the Hidden switch is turned off. Now tap Save to save your configuration.
Now try and connect those devices to this new network and see if that doesn't solve the problem.
Mike, Bocaboy is right. You will have to "separate" the 2 networks. The idea here is that from what I understand, the 5 GHz band radio and the 2,4GHz band radio are both combined into one SSID name to act as WiFI 6 standards. This gives seamless switching between 5 and 2.4 GHZ depending on location, distance, line-of site (signal strength).
So as he said, if you “add” a network of 2.5GHz, then add a second with 5GHZ only, you can then see it in a network browse list,, and select it.
I called them and asked about changing the DHCP scope to allow for static IP's. They will not allow any setting changes to it.
But I realized that I do have static IP’s on a few devices here, and it looks like the DHCP send out a ping to identify if an IP address is in use first, then if so, it moves to the next and assigns it at that point.
I haven’t really had an issue with it.
On the other hand, use an external router to do other things, the VPN function is not on TMOBILE either, you will have to use another router and use it as an access point. Look into DD-wrt and openwrt forums to learn of the ways to make an even better router work for you. I have one, it is an ASUS, but I flashed it to be a much better router with many useful functions. You can use one to do almost anything else you would need to.
There is a quick way to get around the static IP problem. First, make sure your network is working and that the device that you want to assign a static IP to has received an IP address from the gateway. It'll be something like 192.168.12.x. Write that number down and then configure the device for a static IP, using the address you just noted. The router will be 192.168.12.1 and the subnet mask will be 255.255.255.0. Voilá! You now have a static address, allbeit the method is a bit bass-ackwards.
what about lease times ? Will the ip address be timed out after some time ?
No. You're referring to Time To Live (TTL) which is controlled by the gateway. As long as the address isn't taken by another device, it will be fine. And it won't be taken by another device as long as the gateway sees it's an active address.
If you're worried about your TTL disconnecting the device, assign it a number that is out-of-range of DHCP. Normally DHCP starts its range at x.x.x.100 through x.x.x.254. The gateway keeps 192.168.12.1 as its private address, so anything between 192.168.12.2 through 192.168.12.99 should also work. On my T-Mobile gateway, an Arcadyan KVD21 5G gateway, there are no IP addresses given out by DHCP under 192.168.12.100. Use the T-Mobile app to look at Devices and I'll bet you won't find any with an IP address under 100.
Lastly, if you're in conflict with another IP address, your computer will return an error for a duplicate IP address. Just move it one tick up or down to fix it.
The router functions in the T-Mobile gateway are so primative that I keep all my devices behind my original router so I can still have NAT and fixed local IP addresses without change. Essentially, T-Mobile gateway is just a 5G modem. It is much easier to migrate should you need to replace T-Mobile internet with another service provider.
