Forum Discussion
Brand new to home Internet and hoping to improve speed
I read a bunch of the horror stories in here, but decided to try T-Mobile's home internet anyhow 'cause I ALSO read some of the "I get 200+ Mb/s and it NEVER drops below 100" topics. I'm in a town o...
If you get the PCI value you can search for it on CellMapper.net and locate the tower that serves that signal out. With a 4G LTE / 5G NR capable phone it should be possible to obtain the cellular metrics for both signals. The bars on the LED screen are rather generic and do not provide enough information. It does not sound like you are receiving a 5G signal with those speeds or it is a very poor signal reception.
You state you are using CellMapper on your phone so are you looking at 4G or 5G signaling or both?
With CellMapper.net in a browser you can provide your area code to get the general location and then display 4G LTE, 5G NR, or both. I find filtering for one or the other helpful. You will see more 4G LTE towers and IF the 5G cell you receive is on the map that really helps but CellMapper is not 100% as it does rely upon users using the Android application and uploading the findings to the server to have the data installed into the database. This does require an account but it does not cost anything to set up. CellMapper seems to be one of the best resources for locating the cells still. Below is a chart that will help you determine more about your cellular signals. Use the T-Mobile home internet mobile application on your phone to see the cellular metrics. Determine if you really are receiving a functional 5G signal.
I'm very new to cellmapper, and can't run it on any of the actual computers because it insists I'm using an ad blocker. Even when I turn off ALL the extensions in Firefox or Chrome it still complains. So, it's not very useful on the computer.
It SHOWS three towers nearby, but nothing about which one would be used here, or anything else.
Thus, I ran it on the cell phone.
BTW: At the moment, the desktop is getting somewhere between .5 Mb/s (yes, 500k) and 2.1 Mb/s. The cell phone has dropped out of 5G and it got 3.9 Mb/s a minute ago.
As far as 4G or 5G or whatever, I don't know what it's showing. In the home internet app, I can see devices connected (or could, before things turned to *&^%$ a little while ago), and the netword STILL says the connection is "Excellent". I have no idea what PCI is, or how to relate any metrics - are you talking about the stuff in the "more" tab? If so, which ones?
At the moment, there's not even enough bandwidth available to SEND this entry. I had to switch back to the old DSL to get enough network.
ERROR 403
The request could not be satisfied.
Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
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Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: 9Ym2IOUMrdtooem2QzWbBWRFpUGhP1PdL_KUkXwsNletJnd-xXZq5Q==
After which nothing T-Mobile was reachable from any of my networks for a couple hours.
