Forum Discussion
5G home internet keeps dropping
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 losing connectivity at least 3-4 times per hour (even more than that sometimes!)
I am very frustrated - thought this would be so much better that what we had before, but I am giving it one more month and if there is no improvement I’m switching back to my old provider - NEVER thought I would say that!
this service is terrible it has not worked at all lol . most of you at least get it up and running a little i had someone tell me yesterday that 4g towers will soon cease to be working and that we all will eventually have to move to 5g so here i am with a brand new iphone 12 and a 5g home internet service that doesnt work . my advice to you guys is just return it cause no issues will be fixed coming here or calling to that number
I started having issues recently. Was working great, not every so often I have no internet.
Read here that over heating is a common issue. I turned of wifi and connected my Asus router. Hoping this will help.
I am working from home, T-Mobile internet is not reliable and I am getting frustrated every day.
Very disappointed now, stating to consider getting xfinity again.
jtheiss wrote:
18 days of uptime is pretty amazing @jdt254 . If I could get to that, I’d probably just restart the thing once a week just to be sure that we don’t get intermittent faults at times that would impact our work, but at this point, I’m not clearing 24 hours even with a case fan and a router handling the heavy lifting of my home network.
Yes, that would be great if we could get that many days.
At first i thought it was the cooling as well, but adding the recommend fan did not resolve the issue. Thought it was a quality of signal issue which that area can have that, so i added Antennas, made no difference.
I did find out leveraging cellmapper.net that T-Mobile does NOT have their Antennas directed to my area. They have it up and down the interstate but not aimed north or south. This is horrible because many of my neighbors could benefit from this service since DSL is only 1mbps and overpriced or the overpriced satellite service. Literally live 2 miles, straight shot, to the tower but quality of service is horrible. On my roof i can get maybe 25-30m. On the ground, maybe 10.The Gateway did work great at the beginning. Was good and solid, maybe a random drop out every once in a while. But in the past 6 weeks, it has been dropping MOST of the time. We have had it down more than up recently.
Recently, the service has just dropped completely and hasn't been back up. We are at a week now without resolution. EVen had the Gateway replaced feeling it was a defective Gateway, no resolve.
Considering trying the Orbi (with 4G and external antenna connections) or the POE Powered Elsys Amplimax leveraging the existing SIM card to see IF that resolves the issues. After a call with T-Mobile last week, i told them that they need to determine what is wrong and resolve this in a week otherwise we need to change services because we NEED the internet to be working, especially consistently.
Because when talking to the support agent from T-Mobile, they said they could see it connecting to the tower. But when i looked in the menus in the Nokia Gateway, it kept saying Not Connection. One of my frustrations is the lack of control for a experience IT specialist in this hardware. Because it would make my life easier if i could see what signal strength the antennas were seeing.
R Wolf wrote:
jtheiss wrote:
18 days of uptime is pretty amazing @jdt254 . If I could get to that, I’d probably just restart the thing once a week just to be sure that we don’t get intermittent faults at times that would impact our work, but at this point, I’m not clearing 24 hours even with a case fan and a router handling the heavy lifting of my home network.
Yes, that would be great if we could get that many days.
At first i thought it was the cooling as well, but adding the recommend fan did not resolve the issue. Thought it was a quality of signal issue which that area can have that, so i added Antennas, made no difference.
I did find out leveraging cellmapper.net that T-Mobile does NOT have their Antennas directed to my area. They have it up and down the interstate but not aimed north or south. This is horrible because many of my neighbors could benefit from this service since DSL is only 1mbps and overpriced or the overpriced satellite service. Literally live 2 miles, straight shot, to the tower but quality of service is horrible. On my roof i can get maybe 25-30m. On the ground, maybe 10.Recently, the service has just dropped completely and hasn't been back up. We are at a week now without resolution. EVen had the Gateway replaced feeling it was a defective Gateway, no resolve.
Considering trying the Orbi (with 4G and external antenna connections) or the POE Powered Elsys Amplimax leveraging the existing SIM card to see IF that resolves the issues.
Because when talking to the support agent from T-Mobile, they said they could see it connecting to the tower. But when i looked in the menus in the Nokia Gateway, it kept saying Not Connection. One of my frustrations is the lack of control for a experience IT specialist in this hardware. Because it would make my life easier if i could see what signal strength the antennas were seeing.
Vigente
Running Time: 51d 5h 20m
Would be another 21 days but I unplug the unit to install a UPS. So that would have been 72 days up.
If you can post your actual signal that would be helpful.
RSRP
SNR
RSRQ
RSSI
For both primary and secondary.
And Band for both.
RSRP the lower the number the better.
SNR higher is better on this one.
RSRQ lower is better.
RSSI lower is better.
007BondMI6 wrote:
Vigente
Running Time: 51d 5h 20m
Would be another 21 days but I unplug the unit to install a UPS. So that would have been 72 days up.
If you can post your actual signal that would be helpful.
Currently we also have it plugged into a UPS as well.
The last time it was up, this is the results
Primary: Band B2, PCI 466, EARFCN 901
RSRP -118dBm
SNR 1 dB
RSRQ -17dB
RSSI -86dBm
Secondary: Band n71, PCI 262, NR-ARFCN 126270
RSRP -107dBm
SNR -2dB
RSRQ -17dB
This is from the desk in the house without external antennas connected. Signal hasn't improved when attaching Antennas. But also after rebooting the Gateway, it would never connect again.R Wolf wrote:
007BondMI6 wrote:
Currently we also have it plugged into a UPS as well.
The last time it was up, this is the results
Primary: Band B2, PCI 466, EARFCN 901
RSRP -118dBm This is the worst it can get you really have not signal.
SNR 1 dB Super bad only thing worse is 0
RSRQ -17dB Just Bad
RSSI -86dBm Malo
Secondary: Band n71, PCI 262, NR-ARFCN 126270
RSRP -107dBmv Again so bad
SNR -2dB Malo
RSRQ -17dB Ok
This is from the desk in the house without external antennas connected. Signal hasn't improved when attaching Antennas. But also after rebooting the Gateway, it would never connect again.OK with reading like this you are lucky to even connect at all.
You will never hold a signal with reading like this I think you have posted the worst I have ever seen.
Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.
You need a major improvement on those number or this will never work for you. I am just being honest as readings like that no way it's gona work.
007BondMI6 wrote:
Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.
You’re telling me. We did the 2x2 MIMO Log Periodic 4G/5G Hotspot/Router External Antenna Kit from Waveform. https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway
The original results posted were before connecting the antenna. After connecting, nothing.
I did validate that the PCI and EARFCN numbers did correspond to the numbers in CellMapper.net to the tower we pointed the antenna too that is 2 miles away. I am heading back out tonight and will attempt to point it to another tower that is further away BUT it has an antenna that is actually pointed into our direction.
I also did testing with the waveform app (on LTE though because their 5G side in the app doesn't work) and that is where i was able to see some interesting results. (I have T-Mobile cell service on my phone to perform these tests.)
NombreBanda Tecnología Proveedor Latency [ms] Download [Mbit/s] Upload [Mbit/s] RSRQ [dB] SINR RSRP [dBm] adentro 71 (624.5 MHz) 4G 310260 55 2.2 1.9 -16 0.3 -113 Front West side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 47 4.58 0.15 -15 -2.2 -112 North side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 506 7.44 2.51 -13 0 -111 East side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 171 8.39 4.51 -12 -0.7 -112 South side 12 (731.5 MHz) 4G 310260 833 19 1.99 -18 -5.9 -115 roof 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 75 5.35 1.08 -13 -1.3 -110 R Wolf wrote:
007BondMI6 wrote:
Did you say you have an external ant? If you do is it a good one? I bought a few and some are real junk like aluminum foil inside actual junk. Maybe you are pointing to the wrong tower as Cellmapper is so out of date.
You’re telling me. We did the 2x2 MIMO Log Periodic 4G/5G Hotspot/Router External Antenna Kit from Waveform. https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway
The original results posted were before connecting the antenna. After connecting, nothing.
I did validate that the PCI and EARFCN numbers did correspond to the numbers in CellMapper.net to the tower we pointed the antenna too that is 2 miles away. I am heading back out tonight and will attempt to point it to another tower that is further away BUT it has an antenna that is actually pointed into our direction.
I also did testing with the waveform app (on LTE though because their 5G side in the app doesn't work) and that is where i was able to see some interesting results. (I have T-Mobile cell service on my phone to perform these tests.)
NombreBanda Tecnología Proveedor Latency [ms] Download [Mbit/s] Upload [Mbit/s] RSRQ [dB] SINR RSRP [dBm] adentro 71 (624.5 MHz) 4G 310260 55 2.2 1.9 -16 0.3 -113 Front West side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 47 4.58 0.15 -15 -2.2 -112 North side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 506 7.44 2.51 -13 0 -111 East side 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 171 8.39 4.51 -12 -0.7 -112 South side 12 (731.5 MHz) 4G 310260 833 19 1.99 -18 -5.9 -115 roof 2 (1960.1 MHz) 4G 310260 75 5.35 1.08 -13 -1.3 -110 BTW I have calle TMHI support a few times to get cell tower details including location, bands,… they had no issue giving me this info so I could make accurate mapping of my area and plot out the best location to put the ant for tower alignment. The waveform ant are excellent you just need to find the best spot.
I guess I should have searched for customer comment on this before wasting weeks with T-Mobile tech support and having them ship me a replacement which did the same thing. I have the same issue… good cellular signal to a nearby 4G/5G tower, but the ROUTER inside the Gateway just quits connecting any devices to the Internet (whether the devices are Ethernet or WiFi). The "tech experts" all seem to be overseas working from farmhouses (I heard a rooster crowing the day for a long time during the call) and really have no technical expertise at all. They have a script that they run no matter what. They start with, “They are working on the tower.” But when I say, “OK, if there is a temporary outage when they work on the tower, wouldn’t the device automatically reconnect after they are done?,” it’s a hard question “off the script” and they have no answer, which means they really don’t know the technology at all, so they just pivot to some other nonsense.
I asked if there was an engineer who could look at the operating system and logs of the Home Gateway I have to see what is failing and when. No. Customers cannot talk to engineers.
They told me I could suspend the service and not be charged for it and then try later in a few months after tower work (which is not going to fix a damn thing).
It blows me away that SO MANY CUSTOMERS are clearly experiencing the same problem and T-Mobile just deploys human robots who pretend the problem is mine and ignore the systemic nature of the problem.
So I guess I will have to write to T-Mobile corporate... and the FCC… and my Congressional representatives about this. There is NO WAY that T-Mobile should get ONE DIME of the new infrastructure money when it is clear they have a DEFECTIVE product/service and repeatedly demonstrate they just don't care as long as they get their money. They need to DOMESTICATE their Home Internet tech support and staff it with competent experts, not script-reading robots based overseas you can barely understand.
