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 of 20,000 a ways south of Minneapolis.
I have 2 Galaxy S22 phones and at the moment they're getting about 14-16 Mb/s, which is ALSO what the home internet is getting. BUT, minute to minute, speeds on all the devices fluctuates wildly. It can be 4 Mb/s 1 minute and 15 the next, then back to 2.
I don’t know how accurate or consistent speedtest.net is, so is there a better tool for getting good data on speed?
I did the setup with the phone app. And when I told it to find the tower it pointed North. There aren't any towers I know of that are north, but the app said there was. Since it was next to me, I pointed it North, just in case. Got about 14-16 Mb/s. Turned it East, toward downtown, which is straight through the window in the office and got about 14-16 Mb/s. Turned it south and got about the same. Didn't seem to matter. NO direction EVER produced anything like the number I'm seeing from others in here who aren't happy with 50 or 60 Mb/s.
I put cellmapper on the phone and it pointed directly at the tower downtown - about 300 yards away. So, I put the box in the window pointing down town and got about 12-14 Mb/s.
Moved it to the center of the house so it was between wife and me, and it got about 10-20 Mb/s most of the time. About the same as sitting in the office window on on the desk next to me.
A little while ago I moved it so it’s 10 feet from the wife, pointing out a window directly at the tower and it got about 7 - 10 Mb/s, maxed out around 14 Mb/s.
Both phones and the home Internet all say they’ve got 5G, but unless I’m doing something wrong, this has to be about the slowest 5G around…
Is there anything I should be doing differently? Does pointing the thing toward where I THINK a tower is make any difference? Am I three blocks from the downtown tower and just in some kind of 5G wasteland and out of luck?
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.
Interesting…….. Things had not changed… Here’s what the graph looked like a couple days ago.
A normal day here - higher and wildly fluctuating at 5 a.m., slowly degrading. Then, about 2 p.m., it falls on it's face and only gets above 10 Mbps 4 or 5 times for the next EIGHT hours. It GRADUALLY improves after 10 pm.
Tuesday, had another conversation with t-Mobile support Tuesday morning, where THIS person essentially contradicted everything thing the person from LAST week said, except for stating clearly and repeatedly that this was NOT the performance to be expected. And that MINIMUM download speed should not be below 37 Mbps and max out around 130 Mbps. Which numbers would make me happy.
OK...
But, he created another ticket, and THIS time he stated repeatedly that HE would call me back Thursday to see how things had improved…
Continued monitoring yesterday. This morning, after the normal overnight series of points around 60 with a few falling on their face, THIS happened…
Between the 6:26 and 6:36 points (I suspect at 6:30), a jump to numbers in the mid 400 Mbps range. Which seemed odd given the mediocre performance to date, but I DIDN'T look the gift horse in the mouth. Unfortunately, it only lasted 'til about 8 a.m. when it fell back on it's face to 7 Mbps. I confirmed the high speed with speedtest on the computer AND on a cell phone.
Somebody remove the throttling and/or deprioritization for 90 minutes? Any idea what's going on?
After a lot of continued problems, wasted conversations with support, and getting contradictory information from most everybody I've talked too, we were ready to dump the thing and stay with the SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD DSL. Last several conversations went pretty much the same
“The box isn’t communicating with the tower.”
"Except at THIS MOMENT the box is working fine. I have Internet and it's between 300 and 400 Mbps."
“But the box isn’t communicating with the tower.”
“So how WOULD I know this?”
"OH, you'd have REALLY POOR PERFORMANCE!" (This while the thing has been running between 300 and 400 Mbps for the last hour after the last time it crashed and rebooted)
The support person was DETERMINED that the second box was "bad" and wanted it replaced. SO, back to T-Mobile for ANOTHER Home Internet box...
This time the local T-Mobile replaced the Sagemcom box with an Arcadian (not sure of the spelling). It appears to work about the same, but SO FAR, we're not getting the extremely fast 400Mbps speeds OR the extremely SLOW .25 Mbps speeds. AND, it's on day THREE and it hasn't crashed yet.
Yesterday is pretty typical. Only have buffering a couple times and download speeds, at their slowest, are generally at about as good as the ancient DSL.
I'm hopeful this thing will continue working. If it stays up through tomorrow, we'll keep it. I still don't understand the astronomical variability from minute to minute, especially in the middle of the night when there should be very few people doing anything heavy, but as long as it stays high enough to keep things usable I'll just ignore it.
A mechanical question - is this thing prone to overheating? I had a box with a 12V fan in it blowing up through the bottom of the Sagemcom box 'cause I read in here that keeping it cool would keep it running (turned out to be untrue), but if this thing NEEDS the extra cooling I can use the fan, though it annoys the domestic associate who has ears like a bat and hates fan noise of any kind...
T-Mobile service for me is kind of similar (but not exactly the same).
S21 - has been consistent at my address, typically on LTE only and at times picking up n71 (which is actually worse, being ~1 mile away vs. 1200’.)
The modem doesn’t have options, so I have to pick a spot where I can pull LTE from the 1200’ tower and block n71 from the 5G tower until the local is rebuilt.
Speeds are ‘meh’ during the day on the device, and a ‘bit’ worse during the evenings - but almost always +30Mbps, and at times up to 150Mbps.
Middle of the night it will hit +250Mbps (picking up a different n71 / n41 from 1 mile in other direction).
Things should get better in the spring when T-Mobile rebuilds the legacy LTE tower (B2/B66/B12) to LTE + 5G.
I have three towers that are close - the closest is about 2 blocks and line of sight. Another is downtown, max ¼ mile and again line of sight. The third is a little farther away but probably an extra 2 blocks. I'm not sure which one provides the very high speeds I would see periodically with the 2 Sagemcom boxes. Support SAYS it's the one that's 2 blocks away.
I don’t know what tower the Arcadyan is using - it never hits the speeds the other boxes did, but it also doesn’t fall on it’s face a dozen times a day and go below 1 Mbps.
Like yours mine is "almost always +30 Mbps", though it'll get down to 20 for the lows. I can live with that. I'd prefer NOT to see numbers down below 10 Mbps, though SO FAR we haven't had an abnormal amount of buffering when streaming, and large-ish downloads on my computer have been reasonable.
What I’ve noticed today is that the average speed over the last 22 hours (midnight last night to 10 pm) has trended DOWN from a starting average of about 160 Mbps to less than 60 Mbps by 10 pm.
T-Mobile has said a couple times that these gateways need to be power-cycled weekly or at least every other week. It may become a Saturday morning thing to pull the plug for a minute.
BUT, the box has now made it through THREE days with no dreadful numbers and no crashes. If it makes it into tomorrow, we'll keep it and shut down the ancient DSL.
It's now been 28 days with the Arcadyan box. No crashes. A few slow spots every day, but NOTHING as wretched as the Sagemcom box. For the most part, software downloads - usually between 200 MB and 1.5 GB, have been fast AND have not disrupted other network-hungry concurrent operations.
SO FAR, it’s been good enough that we terminated the service with the 17-year-old DSL.
Next comes a bigger challenge. I'll be in Florida, going down the Gulf side, across the Big Cypress and Everglades and up the Atlantic side. I"ll have the Samsung S22 on t-Mobile, the Visible data phone on Verizon, and my Nighthawk M1 on AT&T. I'll be able to SEE where I have service, where I don't, and how good it is.
I live in Summerdale, Alabama and get speeds at around 30-85 / 20-40 facing west, appearing to hit the tower off of 59 in Summerdale with 3 bars. Last week moved the gateway facing south and for a solid week was getting speeds of well over 200 (up to 675 at one time) and 3 bars.
Yesterday service was so crappy, was getting less than 1 meg with only 2 bars facing south/ 3 bars facing west, but still bad service. Looks like for a week I was potentially hitting a tower in the south with great speeds, but now gateway is connecting back to the tower to the west with decent to crappy (at times) speeds.
Is there a new tower going up south of me that for a week was in a maintenance mode providing those out of the world speeds?
