Cannot get a secondary signal

ZubbaDubba wrote:

I thought this problem of having to reboot to get a secondary signal was fixed?  Who knows how often I'll have to check back and see if  I still have 5G?

I'm getting 200down/14up now, about a 40-50mb download speed increase since the reboot.  Anyway, took the plunge and dumped Comcast a month ago.  Fingers crossed T-Mobile keeps upgrading  their towers and improving their hardware/firmware.

The problem of having to reboot to get a secondary signal has not been fixed. If you are getting over 100 down on the primary (4G LTE) alone, that means your house is in a specific location where the 4G is good and the gateway just selects the strongest connection.

There is no practical problem in getting 4G instead of 5G, as long as the speed is comparable. In fact, a small minority of people can get faster speeds on 4G instead of 5G, and they would be better off not connecting to the 5G signal.

The people for whom it is a problem are those who get a speed of, let’s say, over 80 on 5G but then when they connect to 4G alone, their speed drops to a few Mbps or much slower anyway.

Although I haven't connected to 4G alone in weeks, partly from finding a gateway placement where I get a strong secondary signal, and partly because it was a very rare problem in the first place. I know that if I had the problem more of not getting 5G, it would have been annoying since my 4G speeds are very slow compared to 5G.

Also, many people, like myself, can get pretty wild speed fluctuations on the same 5G signal pair, but my speed is very rarely going below 100, and quite often it’s over 250, but this is not a problem for me because I do not have five people in the house all downloading or streaming games or 4K smartTV programs at once, as some people do.

I have some personal experience with the band combination switching though, because I do get switching between B2/n41 and B66/n41, and I restart the gateway (via the button on the side) in the morning to get my faster 5G signal pair and it usually sticks to that combination all day.

I understand that for you, since your 5G gets you 50Mbps faster, you would prefer that speed, and you can try certain gateway locations where that might be more likely to happen, but often, it’s not something location can fix.

So far, T mobile doesn’t do firmware updates (which are pushed out automatically) very often, and they don’t result in the speed jumps like a new equipment installation at the tower can.

For my first few months of use, I had a peak speed of 190 down, my highest ever speed, and then one morning about 3 weeks ago I was getting speeds of over 200, and have had those every day since, on the same band combination and getting the same signal strength I had from the beginning. Just a few days ago, I hit a new peak speed of 420 down.

I try to keep the comments of people who have terrible problems in perspective, even those who had great speeds for months and then their speed drops to nothing. It's not happening to that many people, or even likely to, just because it is happening to them.

So, having a relatively fast 4G-alone connection at your house can be a good thing, not a problem.