Forum Discussion
Does anyone else get slower connections on 5G than 4G?
Initially I received good speeds of up to 200 megabits with my home internet on the primary signal. Unfortunately, as soon as I started getting better 5G signals my speed dropped like a rock. As soon as the secondary/5G signal becomes stronger than the primary/4G signal I get around 15 megabits with many more latency and connection reliability issues.
For some reason, upload speeds are faster than download when I connect to 5G. The bandwidth drop is immediate and consistent whenever the 5G signal becomes stronger than 4G. This is accompanied by problems with streaming videos. If the 4G becomes stronger than bandwidth is faster again until 5G becomes stronger and so on.
When I called T-Mobile they said that the issue is due to “modernization” updates they are making that will soon clear up but I’ve already had the issue for over a month so that just feels like a brush off.
Does anyone else have this issue? I'm tempted to open up the router and disconnect the 5G antenna. Moving the router doesn't help me because then I get either the same issue or poor 4G and 5G connections.
I asked for one of the Askey 4G LTE gateways.
My non-expert opinion is that the 5G signals are too strong on too few towers and are constantly congested because of how many users can connect to them.
Anyway, any 4G signal performs better than any 5G signal for me at this point so hopefully the Askey gateway works out at least until 5G is fully up and running. A couple of months of crappy internet was enough so I'll be happy if I can get stable 4G.
I'd settle for being able to disable the secondary connection in the gateway settings. I'm probably going to literally disconnect the 5G internal antenna at this point. It's really consistent that as soon as I get a 5G connection that's stronger than the 4G my max speed drops 90%.
A lot of users have similar issues. It isn't a universal 4G versus 5G, but it all boils down to what cell tower(s) and what band your gateway connects. In my case:
Primary - B2 has slightly higher download speed over B66, but B66 has 2x the upload speed.
Secondary - N41 is always 3-4x faster than N71 with no difference in upload.
Fortunately, my gateway seems to stay on N41 and only occasionally switch to N71 while switching back by the next day.
The solution to all this is for TMO to add a feature that let's you select the tower and band as a permanent setting. The older hotspots support this so not sure why TMO is hiding this feature on the latest home gateways that are basically the same thing as hotspots.
I had to move my router to a location where it would get a WORSE signal on 5G so it wouldn't try to connect with the degraded 5G performance. It this router had some ability to be configured at even a basic level then I could have just disabled the secondary/5G signal.
I wouldn’t recommend T-Mobile home internet anymore.
