5G home internet keeps dropping

I have seen with my router when the secondary signal drops there will be a disruption for 2-3 minutes. The router does not handle the transition from 4G LTE to 5G NR well. That is my take. 

The change between 184 and 261 on the tower. Interesting. Notice the reported cell direction N 16 degrees and N 0 degrees. You need to look at your position in relation to that tower. Cell mapper reports three cells on that tower. The red dot suggest unverified tower. I have looked to try to find the tower on Google Earth via sat images but it is transparent or no image exist with it included. Probably more uploaded data would help solidify the GPS info on that tower.

It might be helpful to have a call with T-Mobile support and just bring that up. There could be work being done on the tower or there might be some issue with the equipment. If they dont get calls on a given tower I would guess they take it to be good to go.

If you describe the behavior and can provide data on what you have seen it might just help get someone to look closer at it. I am sure support would have to pass that on to the engineering team.

jtheiss wrote:

@jlillard it fluctuates. Anywhere between 60 and 220 down, and 8 and 35 up.

You are lucky. My DL speeds are consistently below 10 Mb/s. I spent 3 hours today mostly on the phone installing a replacement gateway, switching out 3 SIM cards and 2 gateways. My LTE phone is consistently showing 18-30 Mb/s DL. I'm 1.5 Km from my assigned tower. Gateway has 4 bars of signal. Primary is 4 bars, secondary 3 bars. 

iTinkeralot wrote:

I have seen with my router when the secondary signal drops there will be a disruption for 2-3 minutes. The router does not handle the transition from 4G LTE to 5G NR well. That is my take. 

The change between 184 and 261 on the tower. Interesting. Notice the reported cell direction N 16 degrees and N 0 degrees. You need to look at your position in relation to that tower. Cell mapper reports three cells on that tower. The red dot suggest unverified tower. I have looked to try to find the tower on Google Earth via sat images but it is transparent or no image exist with it included. Probably more uploaded data would help solidify the GPS info on that tower.

It might be helpful to have a call with T-Mobile support and just bring that up. There could be work being done on the tower or there might be some issue with the equipment. If they dont get calls on a given tower I would guess they take it to be good to go.

My trashcan has never reconnected to the secondary tower on it's own after I lose connection. I have waited a 5 minute period and I had never gotten reconnected without rebooting. I'll give it 10 minutes on the next drop to see if it eventually reconnects on its own.

I'm the only one in my area that seems to be driving off of the main road. I'll probably drive around where there's no data on the roads around town and see if I can help get a better sense of that unverified tower. Again, my guess is that the location is wrong, and that there's just one big tower in town. I'll keep an eye out though.

Also, the only window I have facing S. that direction is in our bathroom, which wouldn't be a good place considering the moisture and the general awkwardness. I have tried placing it next to the wall facing South but I didn't have a stable connection to the second tower nearly at all, and much less of a connection to the B66. That's where I'm really thinking a external antenna would be a lifesaver to a stable connection to the 5GNR.

What are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

iTinkeralot wrote:

I had another thought or two about troubleshooting this. You have clients upon the ASUS and still have LAN 2 for leverage. The Roku test was informative but what about connecting a small gigabit switch to LAN 2 and using a client or two multi-homed in effect. You could use the investigation client(s) with wireless to the ASUS and have an Ethernet connection to a switch on LAN 2. If the client has issues hitting the internet through the ASUS then disable the wireless and enable the Ethernet port and check results. Maybe take a client and the Nokia router with the 2.5 Ghz wireless on a different SSID and look at results from that angle as well. El Asus ac68u has four Ethernet ports as well as the 802.11ac so take advantage of the physical ports on the ASUS as well. Test and verify. If you have a client with multiple Ethernet interfaces and plenty of resources stand up some virtual machines as well. Linux  would provide yet another data point and physical Ethernet LAN ports tend to just work with Linux. Lots of tools in the Linux environment to play with. Use different clients, Apple, Windows, Linux, Android, Raspberry PI clients. OK maybe I am making assumptions but today it is not uncommon to have all of the above. 

Another parallel investigation you can do is leverage your cell phone and if it is an Apple iPhone put it into field test mode. See if it communicates to the same tower as the Nokia router by confirming both report the same PCI values for the tower signals. Android phones have applications for tower location so yet another option. If you have not yet used cellmapper.net to validate the location of the tower your router connects to i highly recommend doing so. It is simple enough to use and very informative. What cellular channels are you linking to? How strong and clean are the signals? Do the cellular signals bounce/change from one channel to another? Do any of the local devices record errors or drops? Profile the behavior in detail. Focus on any device that can be influential and stands out but keep an open mind on other actors in the path.

Use the web searches to get ideas but focus on the facts. The values and behaviors you can confirm. Don't overlook all the tools you can put to work. Keep notes and analyze the operation in a systematic periodic manner. 

The objective: Determine with more certainty where the problem resides. Look at the physical layer before you go up the stack. 

thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. There's a lot to unpack there and I know I don't have the wisdom or time to get that deep in to this.

getting the right dns config on the asus seems to have resolved the issue for me, at least for the last ~36 hours  

you mentioned you'd not tried the Pi-hole, it will only takes a couple of hours to set up and will improve your browsing experience. Two tips - don't go wild adding a bunch of blocklists; get the iOS "pihole remote" app to go along with it  (stats are interesting and it offers the fastest way to temp disable the Pi-hole or add exceptions)

iTinkeralot wrote:

HWhat are the actual Bands and RSRP, RSRQ and SNR reports from the web UI? It is clear when it has the 5G NR standing you get a solid down but when the signal does down are you seeing the PCI for the 4G LTE and 5G NR cells changing? That sounds very frustrating. If the behavior stays wonky after the router swap I would seriously question if there has been work going on on the tower and ask if they have had other complaints about the operation in the area. That close to the tower it should be good.

So I just lost the b71 tower and I didn't have a drop thanks to my primary tower. I keep leaning towards it somehow being a heating issue. Either way I'm probably gonna ask for another device to swap out with and see how that goes. I'm at a loss of what it could be at this point. Thanks for your help, I'll let you know when/if I decide to get that external antenna you showed me via DM.

Worthless hotspot service wrote:

My complaint is about the MiFi hotspot. I purchase this service so that I could work from home having said that I am locked into a two-year contract for service that I cannot use. I am lost for words. I called support only to be told that there are two towers down and that I am on a tower in the middle and that the problem should be fixed by Tuesday. Well I start training Monday morning and cannot even connect to the Internet so I guess it's too bad for me🤬

There is no contract it’s month to month what are youtalkingg about two year contract???

You can cancel anytime you want no contract no penalty.

Have you used the searchfeaturer to see how to fix your issue? Have you tried different places? If you had you would know that moving the can a few inches makes a difference.

jtheiss wrote:

I'm having a problem with T-Mobile 5g home internet that has not been resolved despite many calls in to the help line.  I've had T-Mobile 5g home internet for almost a month now, and the short version is that every so often the gateway drops the network.  When I say "drop the network," I mean to say it throws everything off of the Wifi that it's broadcasting, and anything plugged in via ethernet says "no network found.  (To elaborate this point, cell phones switch to cellular data because wifi is gone for them, and computers hardwired into the gateway think that they are no longer plugged into anything.)  Turning off the gateway and turning it back on resolves the issue, but doesn't prevent it from happening again.  Whatever is happening doesn't seem to affect our connection speed/strength when the gateway IS providing signal to devices in the home, but due to the nature of our work, we need a connection that won't just disconnect randomly.  

 

To address this, T-mobile has so far run a bunch of tests on their end, and seem to have ruled out a tower issue (which makes sense, as the tower shouldn't have anything to do with whether or not the devices on the gateway's wifi or ethernet connection get thrown off of the network.)  They've sent me a replacement gateway, which is experiencing the exact same problem (3 times in the last 36 hours, in fact).   I've noticed that the device gets pretty warm, so I set up a computer case fan as a cooler to force air through the device, thinking that perhaps it's an issue with the device overheating.  However, while the gateway is notably cooler than it was without the fan, it has not prevented the issue from persisting.  The last thing that I can think to do (and my most recent attempt at resolving this issue) is to plug a router into the gateway via ethernet, and allow the router to handle the wifi/connections w/ devices in the house, and to disable wifi from the gateway all together.  Maybe the gateway is simply too overburdened with connections and gets somehow overwhelmed and shuts down, and having the router handle the "heavy lifting" of taking care of all of the individual device connections will resolve it?  I don't have a great deal of faith that this will fix the issue (as the gateway also kicks ethernet things off of the network when it experiences this problem), but I'm running out of options/ideas of what to do in order to just get a stable, constant internet service.   

 

Is anybody else having this issue, has anybody resolved this issue, or does anybody have any advice or feedback regarding how I might get this resolved so that I can get back to having stable internet?

I am new to internet with T-Mobile. I just switched over. I'm having a terrible time with the internet just dropping. I was hoping to find an answer to this problem. Unfortunately, I see I'm not the only one with problems 

I'm getting a load balancing router and add another connection. This is ridiculous. tornado season is coming and I need a reliable connection. And if this is not resolved soon I will cancel the service.