5G Home Internet T-Mobile Gateway needs to be fixed. There are too many internet disconnections.

I think we all agree, disconnections are a problem that needs to be fixed.

The T-Mobile Home Internet is completely DISASTROUS. The internet drops like 5 to 6 times a day. My partner and I both work from home and this is starting to get really annoying. And when the internet is down, I also can't even use my hotspot. At this point, we are definitely looking into quitting the service. We're on our 3rd modem tower from them and the issues keep coming back. This has been an ongoing issue for at least the last 3 months. No one is able to help, We're both in IT so you can easily assume we have tried EVERY troubleshooting method. We're switching back to SPECTRUM. I don't want to support their services but at least they're better by far in the reliability of their service. 

Agreed!! It's happening to me at least twice a day. It actually wouldn't be so bad if it could reboot itself after the disconnection. I have the latest firmware, router, fan, moved it around the house several times and still regular disconnects. I'm almost a month in and I don't think I've ever gone a full 24hrs without a disconnect.

My advice is watch what you wish for.

My original can was clearly new I got good speeds no issues. They pushed FW to it one night and it got stuck in a boot loop. Replacement unit was clearly used and did not work it said RF failure. Next replacement unit again clear it was used worked but has never seen the speeds of the first unit.

Worse is all this shipping took a week and a half so I was down for over a week waiting on replacements.

Current unit is what I would call slow but steady. It gets 75 ish down 20 ish up and knock on wood just stays up days and days with no interuptions.

Now funny my home a few weeks ago and when I ordered months ago was listed as a Ultra 5G covered area. Now I noticed just this week that only my home is now listed as Extended 5G while all my neighbors are Ultra 5G. Now my can just does not hold a 5G signal so maybe they keeps stats and update the map based on customers results. When I boot my unit it will get B66 and n71 speeds will be same 75ish so it's clear the can is not using the 5G. After a few hours the 5G will just go away and all I have is the primary B66 and there is where it will stay for days and days.

So even though I am a half mile from the tower and 2 miles from a n41 that my phone gets no issue my can never sees them. I am sure the first can did as first can had downloads in the 500+ range. I just don't want to rock the boat as what I have works and my wife and me can work from home all day no interruptions while mother in law streams Netflix all day.

Am I tempted to complain for a new can in hopes I can get back my 500+ yes but not sure I want to take the chance on getting a crap unit.

Other thing is I see cans for sale on ebay and other sites I wonder if they are ok to buy as I did not think TM sold them for ppl to even be selling them. I did see one for $40 I was tempted to grab it for testing.

Joliver89 wrote:

The T-Mobile Home Internet is completely DISASTROUS. The internet drops like 5 to 6 times a day. My partner and I both work from home and this is starting to get really annoying. And when the internet is down, I also can't even use my hotspot. At this point, we are definitely looking into quitting the service. We're on our 3rd modem tower from them and the issues keep coming back. This has been an ongoing issue for at least the last 3 months. No one is able to help, We're both in IT so you can easily assume we have tried EVERY troubleshooting method. We're switching back to SPECTRUM. I don't want to support their services but at least they're better by far in the reliability of their service. 

Disastrous would be if you were attempting to get a better signal by trying the gateway on the roof but you fell off and became paralyzed. A smaller disaster would be if you were like me and had no good alternatives in your area, so if Tmobile ever went wacky on me, I might have to either pay $100/month for Starlink and buy and maintain that stupid dish, or be on CenturyLink's 1.5Mbps new customer service as the download speed I got before with them, 7, is not offered to new customers.

I’m lucky so far.  T mobile home internet works well, kind of like when I went from dial-up to DSL, except this is even a better speed gain bargain price-wise.

As far as trying two additional gateways with no luck at fixing issues, yeah, that's pretty frustrating and disappointing for you. But realistically, you're in IT so you must understand T mobile home internet is in its infancy and they are adapting home internet for a system designed for cellphones. Fiber is the best for fast and stable connections.

Besides distance to tower and obstructions (type and number), there are other more quirky factors that can result in just having a home which is in a bad location for this, even things like what your walls are made out of or have in them, or the kind of coating used on low-E windows, which make a window placement for the gateway not work.

Trying to be realistic, what percent of customers who try Tmobile home internet have your level of bad experience? I'd guess that it is lower than 10% and could be as low as 2%. And what percentage of customers with your experience should a company be allowed to have in order to do business at all?

T mobile's consideration is what level of service to they need to provide to be profitable and beat the competition. My guess is that they are very successful with their new home internet service, and they are trying to expand and improve the service all the time, to win even more market share.

Of course, people working at home need the most reliable connection they can find, and it’s rarely going to be the cheapest.

Your experience answered the initial poster's question well, just as 007Bond did. Switching gateways doesn't fix all problems, and some people's problems with disconnection are much worse than once every few days.

The question might better be, is there anyone who has had this for months and doesn’t get disconnections now and then, or like less than one a month?

Has anyone who knows they now have the 1609 update noticed they no longer don’t get disconnections?

I'd like T mobile to work on their service in the next few months so that EVERYONE gets super fast speed, like the 20,000Mpbs download speed that the CEO of Tmobile said might be possible one day on 5G. And there should be no disconnections and no service disruptions ever. And they should lower their price to $30/month, too.

Unfortunately, this is the real world. "Can you hear me now?" That's the cellular system. 

As noted this is new service and it’s not perfect and sometimes new cutting edge tech is not for everyone as it has issues sometimes.

I am normally an early adopter so I am use to issues new FW, this or that, bla bla bla issues.

I have done way more than the average person should ever do to get this can stable. If this was a perfect world we would just put it where we want power up connect and done. Ain't so.

I started out thinking if my phone gets good speed can should too, hmm not really what happens.

I spent hours mapping out my whole home with my cell before the can arrived found the perfect spot. I ran wires made a shelf real nice stuff. Installed the can and crawling speeds sometimes good then again craw what the heck. Tossed all that work and started testing with the can and more mapping find a good spot think all is well and hours or days later blam craw WTF.

There is no good online source for towers Cellmapper is so far out of date and off it's next to useless at least in my area. At best it will send you on a wild goose chase for towers that are not anywhere near where shown.

So I use my cell and start manually mapping a 4 mile radius of my home. What I discovered is at least in my area the T-Mobile 4G and 5G towers are not in the same location. So issue is if the can is located where the 5G signal is best guess what the 4G sucks. Yup the flip is true if the can is located where the 4G is good the 5G sucks. That's the issue I discovered with the can. The can wants 5G but falls back to 4G. Also for my case the 5G tower is 2 times as far as the 4G tower. So if I locate my can where the 5G is good and it decides to fall back to 4G my can craws and does not recover but when it works speeds are great 500+ down for hours, half a day at best.

But if I locate my can where the 4G is best it stays online for weeks really it never drops unless I power off or reboot it. But speeds are not so great 75ish down at best 25ish up sometimes later afternoon slower. Now when I first boot it it will grab the 5G but soon drop it and hang on to that 4G with a tight grip.

So seems the 75 ish handles 2 work from home zoom calls and mother in law streaming Netflix so I have just settled that 75 has to be good enough for now as I just can’t go back to Comcast and the BS deals.

So if you are dropping and you want to keep the can some investigation may land you on a more solid connection. In my case it did as I first started out thinking the fastest speed was the best location when in fact it was not at least for reliability.

Again you have to do your own investigation the online cell tower maps are useless. Based on what I have discovered on current can design the most reliable spot if you are having issues is where the 4G is the best (not 5G) as it will at some point fall back to 4G.

Wireless is different from DSL and some other forms of broadband in that when it disconnects, it doesn't always immediately reconnect, even when there is a connection there. In the three months I've had this, I get disconnected a few times a week but every time it has happened, I am able to reconnect in the time I turn the gateway off and on via the button, and wait two minutes for my connection to be back. I understand that for some people, this may not be the case and they experience periods of service disruption, but I think most disconnections on this, people can reconnect immediately in the way I mentioned.

Before I got this, when i read that happens to some people, with some much worse than others like multiple disconnections daily, I thought it would find it really annoying. For me though, it not happening a lot and having it come right back on every time is like nothing. Even though my previous provider, a very slow DSL connection, the disconnections were rare, I never knew whether it was going to come back on in 10 minutes or 7 hours when it went down. 

For me, being 5 miles from the tower, this is probably the nature of the beast, getting disconnected every once in a while. The frequency of being disconnected for a user is a variable like speed -- some people get great speed while others don't -- or ping, where some people can have speeds over 300 but too high a ping if they do a lot of gaming and high ping can cause lagging on videos as well. Another person will have a speed of 100 but good ping. So there are probably people out there who don't get any disconnections.

I’ve only had the 1609 gateway update for about four days now and it would be nice if I now get no disconnections, but it will take a few weeks for me to know if it did anything for that, and I haven’t heard of it doing anything for that but it would be nice if it does.

Whether this is "ready for primetime" has a lot to do with how many people have this problem enough for it to be serious for them. In my personal circumstances, coming from such slow, overpriced DSL, with bad or pricey satellite alternatives, Tmobile's 5G is not only ready for primetime, it's a revolution, 10x to 40x the speeds I was getting. However, although people's reactions to problems are relative to what they expect, and what they had in the past, it all comes down to location and how it works for you at your location. With some luck, you don't have the obstruction of a hill between you and the tower that a neighbor ten houses down the street has who can't get a download speed of over 30 while yours is 400.

It's disconnected again. I'm not spending money to test a third party router. I will start looking for another internet provider. I have no other solution since I'm tired of troubleshooting. I just want my internet to be connected.

My home internet drops randomly every few days, but the speed is so slow when it is connected I cannot get above 15 downloading and I live in a sprawling metropolis that they claim to have reign over. So my question is, what's the deal? My cell phone has outstanding service and hotspot but the stupid can can't handle more than one device connected to it at a time, which basically makes streaming video almost impossible. It buffers every minute or so. It's ridiculous. 

I called support again yesterday. They told me that back in July when I called about disconnects they escalated the ticket, and supposedly the reply from the engineers was that I had a bad gateway that needed to be replaced. I have probably called a dozen more times since July, and no on told me that before. They are sending a replacement. I have my doubts that will fix the problems, but it can't hurt (I hope). I have started to look for alternative internet service. I can't keep doing this, It needs to work 99% of the time.