5G Home internet keeps dropping!

I'm also starting to think they are throttling service. Everything worked fine for months up until about 3 weeks ago. Now my internet drops out all the time which is making it extremely hard to get my work done. Customer service gave me the run around saying the tower was being upgraded the first week.. ok cool.. still happening after they said the tower upgrade was complete.  They sent me a new gateway.. still happening with the new gateway but now I'm being told the tower is being upgraded again? 

Customer service and their "experts" are a joke! This is getting ridiculous 

The problem may or may not be with the gateway. You will have to contact T-Mobile support and ask about the work on the equipment in the area. They could be working on the equipment for the cells in the area so it would be a tower problem. From what you can see the internet connection is not available therefore the cellular connection is a highly probable source of the problem.

One thing you can look at are notifications the gateway may have recorded so check for notifications via the LED screen. Another thing to try would be to power the gateway off and remove and reinsert the SIM card. If there is a problem with the SIM card, which some Arcadyan gateways seem to have, then this might help if it is related. That is why I would suggest to check the notifications for errors related to the SIM card. Reseating the SIM card will not hurt. If you have a T-Mobile phone and both tend to use the same cellular source that might be another clue. If your phone transitions to another cell when the gateway drops its cellular signal then it could be a tower equipment related problem. T-Mobile engineers might be performing work on the equipment in the area. T-Mobile does not appear to provide any customer notifications regarding work being performed on the equipment. 

I got home from 10 days of vacation and found that my internet kept dropping out a few minutes after rebooting the router. When I connected a device directly via an ethernet cable the connection time was elongated by about an hour but still would fail. I have opened many service tickets regarding this with no correction. They tell me that they are working through the engineers to correct a software issue but I have found that it is still failing after three days of this continual reboot and use for a short period of time. At this point it fails immediately upon reboot. The device still says it is connected to the Internet although all connected devices to the Wi-Fi or ethernet port say there is no Internet. I am at the end of my rope  for how to get this resolved through technical support.

Hola Melo, 

thanks for the reply. I can definitely relate to your experience as it almost matches mine.  I was getting very good internet service from Jan. 2022 to around August 2022, and then the wifi/internet would cut off and come back on again after a few minutes, this would happen a couple times per day, then it got worse where it would cut off multiple times per for longer times.  I called the so called "experts" and got no where.  They sent a new modem (I was led to believe it was a different and better one but it was the same model!), and they changed the account to a lesser (limited data) so this did nothing other than waste my time.  The "exeperts" are all from a call center Tmobile has in the Philippines.  The people there are nice but they read/play off a script and really just say everything will be fine, we will fix it, and that is all a lie.  They cannot fix anything.  I then had to return the modem, and went to a Tmobile store and they were useless, just told me to call 611.  I called again and the girl gave the same story, oh they are working on the 5g tower and it will be better.  They provided no other details, when the work started, what the nature of the upgrades are, when it will be completed, etc.  I was suppose to get a 20$ discount but Tmobile charged me extra for the modem that didn't work so now I need to call them again to fix it.  I liked the idea of coupling cellphone and internet for $135 all inclusive per month; the cell service is not great but so far I can live with it (I had ATT previously and they are better but Verizon is the best (and most expensive unless you have multiple lines on account)) but the internet service from this 5g system is not consistent and Tmobile customer service and business is deceptive.  I will wait and see if it does improve, but if by January 2023 (1 year of Tmobile for me) it is not better, I am dropping Tmobile.

This started happening to me back in July.  I ultimately had to cancel my T-Mobile home Internet because it just wasn't working for us.  It was nearly flawless for the first seven or eight months of service.  Easily over 300 Mbps for all of our (20+) devices.  It was a dream replacement for our cable Internet that was just getting more and more expensive.  However, no Internet just doesn't work, so we replaced it with Verizon 4G LTE which is admittedly MUCH slower.  Slower, but reliable and always present.  That works for us.  I am very sad that T-Mobile quit on us.  It was great while it lasted.  I think that our usage got us bumped off.  We routinely used in excess of 1,600 Gb of data monthly.  Interestingly, though, during this time our phone's 5G failed to provide Internet for us.  To get an Internet connection with our phones, we needed to downgrade to LTE.  5G would connect, but it wouldn't provide ANY Internet access.  That is clearly unacceptable for a home Internet solution.

I signed up for Tmobile Home Internet 5G service on 9/7/22 and had no problems during the first 2 weeks. Then, on the 3rd week, I started to notice frequent drops in service. where I would get drops between 7:30am to about 7:00PM. It has progressively gotten worse. Today (9/29), I had a total of 10-15 drops. I can no longer make Zoom or VOIP calls as it frequently cuts off during the middle of the calls.

My daily usage is about 15G per day so about 450G/month. I don't think this is is excessive but it appears Tmobile is throttling me now.

Ive spoken to Tmobile several times and I tried all their solutions.

   Power off the device for 1min and power on - Nope.

   Replace the Sagecom Gateway with another one - Nope

   Do a factory reset on Home Gateway device. - Nope.

   Tmobile representative reset the connection from their end - Nope

   We will add more capacity to the tower - Tower is transmitting N71 (600mhz band but low capacity). I am hoping they will add N41 (2.5ghz band with higher capacity). I live about ½  mile away from the tower with direct line of sight so I should be able to receive N41 signals when it become available. Tmobile could not give a ETA for adding N41. I would not hold my breath.

One last observation that has me perplexed. My Gateway is a Sagecom 5688W, I get strong signals (RSRP = -78) but the quality of the signal is poor ((RSRQ = -12) according to Tmobilie. I am going to swap out the Sagecom for the Nokia 5g21 gateway at the Tmobile store to see if it makes any difference. I will add comments after I test this.

I do have a question about the nature of how Tmobile throttles your internet connection. I noticed that the throttling that Tmobile imposes is the following. When in the middle of browsing, getting email, or Zooming, the internet data transfer stops completely but does not actually disconnect. After about 1 minute, it is restored. In fact, I usually run a speedtest after the internet recovers. I get the following result: 125m down and 30 up. Rather than slowing you down, they stop data transfer for about 1 - 3 minutes. This result is worse than slowing your data transfer speed.

In fact, I tested this with another carrier (Verizon hotspot) but it never stopped completely. Rather, data speed was in fact slower.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

The frequent disconnects are annoying when using the internet for working from home. I could handle 1 or 2 discounts late in the day but not multiple discounts throughout the day.

I use Zoom and VOIP calls so you can imagine how inconvenient the frequent disconnect can be.

So for this week (week of 10/10), I am experiencing only 1 or 2 disconnects per day occurring between 5-7PM.

The worst was a week ago in which I experienced 10-15 disconnect instances for several days.

If the tower is congested, I would rather have the bandwidth slowed to around 5mbps rather than being completed disconnected.

I never experienced these kinds of disconnects using AT&T or Verizon. Luckily, have a Verizon hotspot as backup for work.

My home internet started out good for about 6 months, then in the summer it was weaker I guess because of trees/leaves and other interference . Moved the modem around the home to get the best signal. Then after the summer it would always work good in the morning until about 2:25 each day then the kids from other households(no kids in my household anymore) would come home from school and it would disconnect for 20 minutes and then be spotty until 5pm.  Called support several times. They finally admitted to a congestion issue that would be  solved "soon" which was three months… The bottom line is tmobile is signing up too many customers which drove me to leave. Back to cable and somehow at half the cost for two years. BUT kudos to tmobile and other companies for providing competition to cable to drive down prices. 

Custom service was always polite and but if tmobile is signing up too many people then it is pointless service.

I have the same story. Worked great for the first several months. Last 5 weeks it has sucked. Dropping calls, streaming, just cuts out for 1-2 minutes every hour.  Works great late at night or early morning, so it is probably over-crowded cell towers.  Customer service checked everything out, didn't find anything wrong, so they just said there is nothing they can do.  I am shopping for new internet service.

Looks like Tmo deprioritizes home internet users. I found this article on the Internet

Speed claims

It wasn't all rosy for T-Mobile. Charter argued that because T-Mobile Home Internet customers share the same network as mobile users but are prioritized last, consumers may experience much slower speeds than advertised during times of congestion.