5G home internet keeps dropping

Right now the RSRP on the n71 is reported at -79 dBm, which is about the best I have seen it. The T-Mobile engineers upgraded the tower on Monday and since then mine has been working well.  With a little change in the exposure of the 5G antenna it really made a nice difference here. I found the router spin a little at a time to be beneficial. I still would like to have an external MIMO antenna.

I spoke with a T-Mobile tech this afternoon and was able to switch back to our 4G LTE gateway. That solved the problem, our signal was restored without any problems.  Apparently T-Mobile is in the process of upgrading their towers so they are compatible with the new 5G gateways but they haven't completed the process in all areas.  As it was explained to me the new 5G gateways are supposed to receive either the old 4G LTE signal or the newer 5G signal but for whatever reason our unit didn't receive either very well.  

@jtheiss I like your suggestion that we document our experiences on one thread in as detailed a way as possible. One idea would be for users using additional airflow to record the mean time from reboot to failure both with and without such airflow. I'm convinced its a heat issue, but know from experience that trying to get action on this through bottom tier tech support in Mexico is futile. Nothing speaks louder than hard data, and the possibility of exposure through a major publication. I intend to make this case to T-Mob management directly, and it will be very helpful to have a user group compiling this data to point to. Thank you for your efforts.

Farjohn wrote:

@jtheiss - I'm curious to know if both the gateways behaved identically. That is, were you running the cooling fan on both of them? Same exact failure mode, etc? Even if not, there are enough variables in any design that if the problem is with a voltage regulator, for example, many other components "could" be affected differently due to varying component sensitivities to low voltage conditions. This could lead to a difference in failure modes in something as complex as a combination gateway / wireless router. The fact that a Tech Support person offered the fan solution and was surprised that it didn't fix the problem is significant. I've worked in companies where products have known and fixable design issues and management decided to ignore the issue after a cost / benefit analysis. And of course we've all heard the horror stories about the auto industry. Thanks for your input.

FJ

Sorry, I missed this message and never responded.  So, the first and second gateways behaved similarly, yes.  I didn't think about cooling when I had the first Gateway, so it went back without testing for airflow.  Both would work great (speeds reaching 215 down and 35 up) until they didn't, failing in the same way.  Only after the second one ran for 6 days w/o problems and then faced the exact same issue as the first did it occur to me that heat might be a problem, as the odds of being sent two gateways with the exact same problem were pretty slim unless it was a design issue that all units of that type would be plagued with.

I also have the black trashcan and can confirm ~daily disconnects. 

Overheat may be an issue, but I can report other factors that don’t seem to be heat related:

(FYI, I used 192.168.12.1 to identify issues below)

After a disconnect, warm reboots do not solve the issue. Disconnecting power for ~3 minutes (even though trashcan has "partial" battery backup, this seems sufficient) allows it to reconnect cellular. However, it does not reconnect its secondary connection unless I first turn off my netgear WiFi router (it's about 10 feet away) while I reboot the trashcan. 

(Also, I do not see a way to disable WiFi completely on the trashcan. Best I can do is reset WiFi channels to "auto" and reduce their power transmission to 12%. )

On power up, trashcan then reconnects primary and secondary connections (channels b2 and n41 respectively) and speeds and ping are excellent (~180 down, ~25 up, 15 ping). Approx 2-3 bars, mostly 2 bars. Then I can restart the netgear and all is good.
 

Then, wait ~1 day, disconnect occurs, rinse and repeat.

(One reason I don’t think my issues are heat related is because I put the trashcan on the roof (shaded by a cardboard box) and it performed well on a 90* day with no disconnects and 50gb of download). 

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 having the same issue and I'm glad I am not alone. 

RTMay wrote:

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!

External antennal if you have low signal solved all my issues.

jtheiss wrote:

@Fredreed I'm still on hold waiting to report this again.  I've asked a number of times what they're going to DO to fix this, and asked more than once if they'll send somebody out.  I think I'm about a phone call away from cancelling, as this is eating up too much of my time.  I don't understand how my cell phone can have a constant internet connection, but a device that's much simpler can't.  

So I am in the midst of a week long Home Internet 5g dead signal.  Totally agree with this comment about eating up time.  Prior to this issue I was seeing upwards of 100mbps speed.  Have talked to many support people that I don't understand and they don't understand me.  So finally talked with a supervisor that I could understand.  He gave me as much info as he could and admitted that they had no idea.  Esentially, he said wait a while and hopefully the signal will come back.  I make the point that my 5g cell was getting a great signal and 50 to 70mbps speed and didn't understand why the home internet device wasn't working.  So he explained that the cell phone can handle multiple bands but the home internet only handled one and if it isn't working then no data.  I also have to decide how long I am going to put up with this mess.

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 also having this issue.  I am on my third 5g Gateway, tried switching SIM cards, use a cooling fan and off-loaded the WiFi duties to a Netgear Nighthawk.  I get two to three bars and drop a few times a day.  I finally bought connection monitoring software and it reports that, when the network fails, "URL domain names are not being resolved but IP based traffic is still flowing over the connection". It seems that, after a minute or two in this state, the box resets the connection resulting in a new IP address. Just figured I'd share that!

For whatever it is worth, in the 10 days since I began power cycling my gateway every morning at a time when not having internet for 2-3 minutes is fine, I have not had it drop on me unexpectedly.