Home Internet Port Forwarding working in 2021?

We shouldn't have to buy a VPN to use the internet we pay for. I need port forwarding as a basic ability. It seems this used to be a feature on the older models and this new 5G one can't do it. 

The support for this service has been absolute garbage. Long hold times, many transfers, to people who don't know anything, hang up on you, and barely speak English. It seems they are given no real way to help customers when you say you have a problem. They are like Fedex agents and just make things up and lie to make you happy. They will say they will send techs to the tower, or they will fix the problem, or they will send a replacement router, or they will call back and it's clearly just all lies. Nothing changes and they never call back and they never send the router. 

I was promised this would be 5G internet and then when I get it they now claim 5G is upgrading in my area with no estimate to when it will happen. So they just lie to get customers. The sales agents don't know the difference between 5G and 5Ghz wifi. 

Speeds have been very inconsistent and so has latency. 2-10mbps is common with a max of 80 being the highest I have ever seen. 100ms ping is also common. Have to reboot the router randomly to get internet back. Even with 5 bars of signal speeds can be slow and sometimes 3 bars gets more speed. 

No port forwarding is the icing on the crapcake. $50 a month can get better/faster/more consistent service from verizon fios with 1/5th the latency and port forwarding. Too bad I live in an area where 1 local company has a complete monopoly. 

I am in the same boat yall are on. Same troubles for the same reasons. I even got a Pure VPN account which didn't seem to work with my router which isn't that old. I contacted XFinity and get my internet plan turned back on with a good discount even if just for the first year. I cancelled my band-aid VPN service for a full refund and will be putting the 5G T-Mobile Gateway n its box and will ship it back. 

I have learned quite a lot about CGNAT, 464XLAT and interesting things on the subject but in the end, I do not have a public ip and from what I understand never will from T-Mobile home internet. Now my VOIP phones and security cameras will work again, just like they have for years without any trouble or intervention.

I will certainly miss the speed and cost but I cant throw more money (new hardware, VPN service etc) at this  problem. The day T-Mobile offers a public IP with all incoming ports unfiltered is the day I will try again.

I feel an idiot after buying this hot spot. They should of never called it home internet but instead called it what it was which is a hotspot which I could have got with my phone. False advertisement basically. They could of been more upfront about this. I expected it to be just like any other home internet. As much as I hate and despise Century link, I'd be better off with their internet as they actually have port forwarding/etc. This internet is pretty much useless to me. I am awaiting an answer from TMobile regarding the potential of them adding this in the future. But if this wont occur I am returning this and buying Century Link (its slower but its ACTUALLY home internet).

I am in the same boat as ya'll trying to set up port forwarding but hit a rock-solid wall. I was informed during the purchase by the rep that it's possible and can be done by talking to support team but clearly from others experiences the  support team is not really supporting much with this issue, what a bummer. I am getting speeds comparable to Xfi with all my devices connected at a better price so was really hoping and rooting for this 5G service but with port forwarding snafu I am not so sure!

This here sums it up on what needs to happen to allow Home Internet Gateway to be used in similar ways as the traditional modem. Fingers crossed on getting a solution soon -  

piperpilotjim wrote:

Just started setting up my T-Mobile Home Internet Gateway, and the speeds and latency look very good, (low 10's of milliseconds ping, 300-500 Mbps downlink, 50-80 Mbps uplink, BUT, there doesn't seem to be anyway to accomplish port forwarding in the web GUI. What a major oversight. They need to add several controls:

• DHCP reservation (required for port forwarding)
• Port forwarding (to devices that have IP reservations)
• Auto firmware updates
• Ability to modify DNS servers that are used

In absence of these functions, they could perhaps provide a way to act exactly like a cable modem: provide all ports at a wired Ethernet connection and allow the WiFi to be turned off. Let us do the rest if you can't do it.

Still waiting for port forwarding, this is such an important feature. It's ridiculous this isn't available as of yet. 

Stop waiting for this.  It'll never happen.  It is an inherent mobile ISP limitation.  The reason (very technical) is the inherent capacity limit of IPV4 / carrier grade NAT / etc, and is not double NAT per se.  The helpful customer support people do not have the training (knowledge) to clarify this, likely ever.

This, however, does work: you can expose a computer / device sitting behind your (Tmobile 5G/LTE) router to the internet via a service like ngrok.com.  Or any VPN service.

WARNING this below is not going to be easy for non-technical users.

In brief, use ngrok to create a connection from your computer / device to the internet, bypassing the inherent mobile ISP limitation.  You need a computer (constantly) running a program, plus reasonable home networking knowledge, to do this.

In detail: you need a computer in your intranet running the ngrok server.  Ngrok is just one such service.  On this ngrok server, it redirects (via VPN) traffic from <your custom domain name>.ngrok.io to <your ngrok server>.localdomain, then to <your device>.localdomain (any device eg xbox/PS6/etc on your intranet with a fixed intranet IP).  You can find more details here https://superuser.com/questions/1258093/set-up-a-web-server-behind-a-carrier-grade-nat.  Most likely you'd pay for the basic service, or use the free one (free randomly generated domain name).  Likely you'd want to keep the ngrok server running 24/7.  None of this is simple, but it works if you can navigate the details.  

you can’t do port forwarding because the T-Mobile 5G network does not support IPv4.  the gateway does not even have an IPv4 address.   you reach IPv4 address through 464XLAT.

next would be to see if the firewall in the gateway supports allowing incoming traffic to your device’s IPv6 address…  

Wow, thank you for the ngrok tip! What a very cool service (for the tech inclined). Had it going in a few minutes. Running it from a Raspberry Pi to tunnel to my IP cameras.

So what is the workaround vpn? I have  want to connect to my house from work. How a vpn service has any one tried? If so how and what vpn?

Gracias

I just got a 4G modem with a hotspot sim.  It worked great at first, but then I figured out that nothing could connect back in.  I've read some of the posts above and it looks like some people have gotten around the problem with VPN.  I understand that the IPv4 addresses are scarce and this is behind an IPv4 NAT, so we never get to see the real IP address.

I was wondering if they could just assign everybody a static IPv6 address.  There is no shortage of those.  I think I could probably work with that.

I got this as a replacement for cable.  So its starting to look like I'll have to call the cable guy up and apologize for all the nasty names I called him.