Connected, No Internet

Having constant drops of home internet for last week in Kent WA. When was working good I was getting over 400 down and 80 up on home internet and over 600 down and close to 100 up speed on iPhone 14pro max .

Today got a replacement of the modem and same thing happened after 15 min of normal working order. Since I connected the new modem about 5 hours ago had to restart it 3 times. Not sure what else to do except of getting a different company and forgetting T-Mobile.

This issue has nothing to do with the router or any devices. I know this because I used (still do as secondary) a T-Mobile MVNO and started having this exact issue a few months ago, and it's happening more frequently now. I just got Home Internet a couple weeks ago... same issue popped up. Everything looks connected, but no Internet.

The only thing that seemed to fix it with the MVNO was to have them request a line reset with T-Mobile. Love the speed when it works but this is insane that this issue is happening.

This has happened to me as well.  I have the Nokia trashcan.  At first I had two bars of signal and nothing would work, even though my address is listed as "available" for 5G home internet.

After a month of putzing with it and wasting time with tech support, I bought a 2x2 external antenna, cracked the case, and hooked it up (yea T-Mobile, I said it.  F**k you!), pointed it at the nearest tower…..and got 200mb/s down with three bars of signal.  It was glorious!  It worked like that for three months.  Then one day I noticed the speed dropped to 50mb/s.  A month after that I was at 1mb/s, still with three bars.  And there is has stayed for three months.

So tonight I setup a Netgear LM1200 hotspot with the 50gb dataplan.  I put it right next to the trashcan, no external antenna or anything.  And got 20 - 30 mb/s down with 2 - 3 bars of signal.

Two hours on the phone beating my head against the wall with tech support later, they opened a ticket "for engineering".  The rep had no idea what to put in the ticket and kept referring to "signal problems".  I told her multiple times there are no signal problems.  This device is getting throttled somewhere on the T-mobile network.

This company is clueless on this issue.  The reps won't even acknowledge that it is happening.  I'll wait about a week for no one to call me back with an update and then I'll probably go buy a grandfathered unlimited hotspot AT&T sim card and go on down the road. 

Unlimited 5G home internet was a nice idea, but T-mobile as a company is just too incompetent to pull it off.  And that's a shame.

I've been having trouble with my phone service and internet since January and nothing has changed except my bill is outrageous. I can't use it but like I told you my neighbor has been hacking my phone and TV and now I have home internet and that's being hacked. I have paid over 2000 dollars in the last 8 months and I can't use it but he can and like I said when I turn his power off everything works great but you don't have anyone checking it out so that tells me it's legal to hack then pay for your service but if you kick the then the police will arrest me what a great system. I can't believe I paid for nothing all this time. I feel that I've been let down by t-mobile and I thought that this was going to be a good place to get help but all I got was more lies and not any help getting matters taken care of no refunds. I'm just tired of all of this and I see I have to do this on my own and I don't know what to say 

Well, I’m checking out.

It turns out, T-Mobile will not refund the monthly autopay once you're past the 90-day mark. And, while there is a "suspend" option on the account, that would cost me $10 a month for no service at all. I might as well take a ten dollar bill and put it in the shredder once a month.

Given the numerous topics on this community forum reporting loss of internet access, the picture is becoming clearer. If I had to guess, I'd say T-Mobile oversold the internet service and found themselves in a bind when they discovered they had insufficient capacity. Not wanting to hurt their mobile phone business, they have had no choice but to cut off their internet gateway customers. "Problems associated with tower work in your area" is merely a fabricated excuse in most cases.

In my case, a so-called engineer's report traced my service interruption to being in a poor coverage area. Not only is this nonsensical (because I get three bars on the gateway device and the service worked great for ten months), it also makes it clear that they have no intention of fixing the problem. Never mind that I was told at the time of signup that I was in range of their cell towers and that my projected usage (2-person household, primarily video streaming and online shopping) was exactly the kind of traffic for which the system was designed.

It's been a disappointing experience. T-Mobile can certainly expect that I will not be recommending any of their products to anyone. Also, I'm sure the FCC will be interested in their questionable practices.

Good luck, folks.

"The 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz bands you mentioned are wireless frequencies used to connect your devices to the gateway.  They have nothing to do with how the gateway communicates with the cell towers (usually 5G cellular or LTE)"

Yes.  They are different but that didn't stop two T-Mobile Tech people from "assuring" me that changing the wifi from 5Ghz to 2.4Ghz would solve me problem.  I did.  It didn't!  It is possible that, for us, the problem was an influx of tourists in the area taking all the 5G bandwidth.  The real problem is that the Nokia "trashcan" doesn't have the ability to turn off 5G and only connect LTE.  In my opinion it should be able to do this automatically if it detects a poor 5G signal.  At the **very** least there should be a manual way for T-Mobile (or the end user) to do this.  I think I would have given the service another shot if there was a way to do this.  As it is, Dad has Verizon now and the "trashcan" is winging it's way back to Texas

The 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz bands you mentioned are wireless frequencies used to connect your devices to the gateway.  They have nothing to do with how the gateway communicates with the cell towers (usually 5G cellular or LTE). Likewise, the WPA settings you mention are just the various methods of encrypting communications between your devices and the gateway via your wifi network.  The cell tower is not involved with the WPA communications that occur between your devices and the gateway. The gateway has its own set of security and encryption protocols used to communicate with cell towers, and you can not change that via any settings that you can make via the T-Mobile app or the web UI.

That said, the settings you are describing can indeed affect the speed and security of the wireless communications between your devices and the gateway, and that can affect the overall internet speeds you see on your various device.

Jim12957 wrote:

We've had TMobile Home Internet for several months, and it's been rock solid from day one.

 

Until the last 24 hours.

 

Every 10-30 minutes or so, our devices get 'Connected, No Internet', and the only way to fix it is to power cycle the gray trash can (as we call the modem).

 

Very confused, as it's location hasn't changed since initial setup, nor have any of its settings.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

The posts about resetting to factory settings are incorrect!!! This is NOT a fix.  After 6 weeks and 10 hrs with Advanced Tech Support dept (unable to help) I have solved the problem. As background I had flawless fast service for 2 months, then it was terrible. I'm 600ft from my 5G tower in a major metropolitan city too. 

Here's the solution(s)... use the T-Mo Home Internet app. Switch to 5ghz from the standard 2.4ghz if you're close to your tower. 2.4ghz is for longer broadcast distances. We switched and service definetely got better but was still unacceptable. The real thing that worked was (on the same page of the App) select WAP/WAP2 from the default WAP2/WAP3 encryption. Our cell tower must have had a software update that is not prioritizing WAP2/WAP3 encryption IP traffic. I took the entire router to my boat in another city/state (that's not even available for TMo Home Internet) and with the original settings it was passing 240MB down with 31ms ping. This is how I knew it was a problem from my local tower. Roll back the encryption standard and your service will come back. I'm getting about 44mb down now but the ping is about 200-300ms. 

I'm having the same problem with my 90 year-old Dad's internet.  It was good (20 mps) when I first got it for him last October.  Since the beginning of July it's been terrible.  Like, 0.15 mps terrible.  It's so bad that I can't even bring up a webpage to run a speed test.  I've called T-Mobile tech support 4 times and I'm getting really tired of hearing their script.  No internet means my Dad (who lives alone) has no TV and no phone.  That's right, the connection is so bad VOIP doesn't even work.

The Nokia unit is showing 4 bars and the tower is less than a mile away.  I think I know what the problem is but there doesn't seem to be any way to correct it.  The 5G signal is "poor" but the LTE signal is "excellent".  Unfortunately, there is no way to turn off connection to the poor 5G signal.  I had even considered asking for a 4G router instead but I'm just going to get rid of the service.  Why should I spend all my time trouble-shooting their lousy service? Fios is coming on Thursday and Dad is on a hotspot borrowed fomo the Library until then.  I really wanted to like T-Mobile Home Internet and I did at first. Now, however, I hate it and I doubt I will *ever* try it again - even they get their act together

Thanks to all those posting here, proving that my issue is far from unique and isolated. About 40 days into this failure mode, I am still without internet service via my T-Mobile gateway.

After many, many frustrating phone conversations with "tech support," I'm on my third device -- this time the Arcadyan model. The problem remains the same: "good" connection with T-Mobile's cellular network but no internet service… not even a blip... this after about ten months of what I consider stellar internet access, given the paucity of options in my area.

To Jay from Georgia: Thanks for your post, but I sincerely doubt you spoke to an actual engineer. T-Mobile has erected impenetrable firewalls to prevent that from happening. Instead, you most likely spoke to one of their offshore "tech" representatives, who can do little more than perform scripted procedures and file trouble tickets. One of the last reps I spoke to claimed he was the last stop on my journey to a solution, promised to stay on top of it, and would get back to me with updates. I haven't heard from him in a couple of weeks.

Still, the thought of reconnecting with my local cable company is so odious to me, that I am willing to wait. As long as I keep getting credited (for my autopays) for outage days/weeks/months, I have nothing to lose. Reports here are encouraging in that some users seem to regain service after some indeterminate period. In the meantime, I can limp along with my slow, expensive, rock-solid DSL service.

I will update as I can.