Tmobile Home Internet with Tmobile Cellspot

"So why can the Home Internet Gateway connect to a Tower, but your phones need a cell spot instead of directly connecting to a Tower"

So I would guess it's the same problem that I have. There's one corner of the house that gets a good signal.. so you put the TMobile router in that spot. But then the rest of the house has little to no signal.

I am also having the same issue. The worst part is that almost 3 years ago when I set up the personal cellspot, I was told it would be a temp fix as they were upgrading the towers near me (2 miles).

Well, it appears they did not upgrade the tower.

Side note….the T-mobile map that shows an area as 5G extended…..taker it with a grain of salt. I found out from one of the reps at T-mobile that I have been working with to get this resolved that the 5G signal….and even the 4G LTE signal is only strong enough for an outdoor connection. T-mobile knows the signals are too weak to use indoors…..but they do not explain that. They just want to be able to show a pretty colored map.

As of now, T-mobile has still not provided a viable work-around to the issue. I have contacted both the cell phone and home internet division. Get the usual..."We are always upgrading towers to give users the best possible experience"  line. 

T-mobile has no clue how to handle the issues they have…..seems like there were some huge holes in their beta testing.

Just got my gateway & informed the TMobile rep that I would need to plug in a cellspot & solar monitoring to the back via Ethernet ports. He told me no problem. I hooked everything up except for the two ethernet spots and the internet was great. I plugged in the cellspot and the other device everything went down and the cell spot itself wouldn't work either.

I just spoke to a tech support rep and their answer was to buy a weboost and splitter to hook everything up only to find out that a Weboost is over $500, that's out of reach for me. So now since I need the cellspot, I guess I'll continue spending double for the internet. Thanks TMobile.

I am wondering if anyone managed to solve this issue? I have the same situation as the OP. I have an external antenna which allows me to get Tmobile Home Wifi. However, the signal isn't good enough for me to get service in my home. Using Wifi calling is a no go, evident by the fact that as soon as I get into  a service area away from my house, I generally instantly receive all the texts I was missing at home. This issue actually goes deeper for me. Occasionally my home wifi also likes to connect to my neighbor's cellspot. My speeds suddenly drop from ~100mbps to ~8 mbps. 

As others have suggested, the most logical solution is for the TMO gateway/router to be able to lock into specific cell tower bands and signals thus ignoring the cell spot ones. This is a feature that benefits all TMO home internet customers since there are many more situations where the TMO gateway randomly decides to connect to other signals only to degrade performance. Unfortunately this signal/band locking feature is currently not available but we know it's possible because older LTE hotspots had this feature.

So, like others I spent about an hour on the phone talking to TMobile after my last post. The only thing that I got out of that is that TMobile hires absolute imbesiles for their home internet support team. To anyone with an ounce of technical understanding, you can see why having a gateway wirelessly connected to a transmitter which is hard wired to itself is not going to work. After describing the issue calmly and as elementary as I could numerous times, I was met with responses that made it clear she had no idea what was happening. (I think she thought WiFi and Internet are interchangeable/dependent terms? She couldn't understand why if I wasn't losing wifi, why I wasn't able to connect?) Very frustrating exchange. I'd say it was like explaining to a kindergartener what the issue was.but then for fun I explained it to my 5 year old after the call to see if I wasn't doing a good job and she understood first try..... Finally talked to a supervisor that was odd at best. He assured me that he would use "all the powers he holds as a supervisor" and employ "the very best Engineers in the company" to fix the problem. Thought we were getting somewhere, then right before he hung up he told me a work around would be to turn on tethering on my cellphone and connect to that. 🤨 Sooo... probably still lost then?

One easy way would be if the user could limit the 5G gateway to connect only to 5G . The cellspot is LTE so the gateway would not ry to connect to the cellspot. I know that does not solve the issue for those that can only connect the gateway to LTE but it is an easy fix for the many connecting to 5G. 

sailracer wrote:

I’ll give this a try : T-Mobile 4G LTE CellSpot Signal Booster (New 2nd Gen) $14 on amazon. connects to weak cell tower signal and boosts it in your house. kyp! 

Let me know if it works for you, there is not much info about that device.

I have the personal cellspot. I have my own modem and my own router. Everything works as it should.

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/public-files/images/support-non-device/4G%20LTE%20CellSpot%20Quick%20Start%20Guide.pdf 

My problem of late is a huge jump in broadband data usage. I suspect more neighbors using T mobile and accessing my cellspot. Working on solution. BTW trying to find a post I found on Google but can't find here:

T-Mobile
https://community.t-mobile.com › c...
CAUTION Rural Peeps, Cell Spot WILL eat ALL high speed data

Interesting, I have the same question. I'm in one of those fringe areas that gave me minimal bars so I got the CellSpot which works fine but I was thinking about getting Home Internet and was wondering if you can set it to use 4gLTE vs 5G so it would take advantage of that cellular signal.  I reckon if I can do that, it makes the CellSpot worthless which probably isn't that huge of an issue for me as I normally don't lose wifi and could just use wifi calling.  But if the home internet is always trying to access 5G because it sees a weak signal then it would be worthless.  Thoughts?

Gracias,

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