Forum Discussion
Frequent Disconnection on 5G Home Internet
Just putting out my observations on disconnects on my 5G Home Internet -- hoping that T-Mobile's engineering will take notice because I'm not sure if my support calls during the past several months have trickled up. I will place another support call again to communicate these observations.
My gateway is on the latest 1609 firmware.
During the last several months, I noticed that at least once a week, usually on a weekend, my Internet connection will drop out, sometimes two or three times on a given day. It was unpredictable. It could occur several times during a given week; and, like most, working remotely, it wreaked havoc on my work day. Often noticed service disruption when streaming video starts buffering or my vpn drops out. Sometimes, I'm able to catch a severe degradation of speed on a speed test app before it becomes unusable. I usually see 300/50 Mbps, so 1 to 2 Mbps down was definitely not a reasonable speed -- especially with the gateway still showing four bars.
In every case, power cycling the gateway fixed the issue. But obviously this is an unacceptable solution.
I opened a support ticket back in October 2021. Over the next couple of months, we replaced the unit+sim. We've powered off/on with removal of power for a period of time. We've replugged directly into the wall as opposed to a surge protector (which was an inane suggestion). Two engineering tickets were opened with no one getting back to me. All to no avail. The support experience was frustrating, especially when it was clear no one had a clue to what was going on and were trying to give me things to do to make me feel like something productive was being tried. I had to fly out for two weeks during the Christmas holidays, so held off of switching service providers until the new year. (I was a FIOS customer and was looking to go back -- I had no issues there, but I thought I'd try T-Mobile after a storm ripped out my optical switch from the side of my house.)
During my time away in December 2021, I asked my tenant to check speeds and report any service outages. To my surprise, during the two weeks we were away in December, there were no outages.
When I returned from holidays, service was still consistently good -- actually even better, up to 320/60 Mbps -- and I wondered if there was something repaired or improved on T-Mobile’s network.
Until I used a vpn (RealSolid) to watch some, er, region specific video content. Noticed that an hour or two into the viewing of the video stream over vpn, service would degrade until it dropped out. A reboot of the gateway would bring service back. Service was good during the week until I used the vpn again the following weekend. So this had gotten me to suspect that while1609 may have repaired some vpn client issue, it is still not handling vpn traffic properly.
During the previous months, I actually rarely used this aforementioned vpn, so I'm hypothesizing that it may have been my work VPN (GlobalProtect) with a sustained connection over time. My work vpn has been fine since starting back at work, but i have purposely shut down my work computer every evening. I'm going to keep it running as I did prior to Christmas to see if I can reproduce the issue. If it recurs, I suspect the sustained use of some vpn clients may be affecting service.
In any case, it appears that engineering will need to look closely at their code and fix the handling of vpn traffic.
@raphael I have the same problem, as do many others posting on this forum. T-Mobile has been completely unresponsive in addressing it. My dropouts have occurred multiple times a day for the past few months. I don't expect miracles, but reliable WiFi service should not take a miracle to achieve.
i too have been having this issue lately. i was told it could be: not plugged into a wall socket - not the case, messages being sent to unit that might be causing the disconnect, so the number was changed - makes no sense to me, but.... they kinda don’t have an answer as to what the problem is. i think it could be due to too many users in my area streaming at the same time. it seems to be in the evenings and weekends. if it happens during the day while i’m at the office, i wouldn’t know. but they need to fix the issue. if it continues, they have to give credit since it’s an issue with their service. it’s not like i’m doing something wrong.
I have been fighting this issue since mid Jan, right after the first weekend of 5G tower upgrades. Prior to that when the Gateway was on the 4G LTE, it worked flawlessly for 3-4 months and I never had to reboot it.
Sadly, the customer service is clueless as I too have been asked to change the power outlet, factory reset, power off, unplug, etc.
I was first told that there were tower issues and I'd be impacted for 2 weeks. I got a credit for that and 2 weeks later it worked a few days and the same issues occurred (no internet though good tower connection, drops during the day which is painful with VPN). They moved me to a different tower only to be kicked off and re-assigned to my non working tower when they told me there were once again tower issues needing several days to correct.
On 3/3, they sent me a new gateway with no sim card. I changed sim cards and had the same issues. They then told me it was a sim card issue and would send me a new sim and GW that is verified to work before sending. It yet again cam without a sim card so I took it to the local store for a sim card and it wouldn't boot due to a hardware failure.
I then demanded a second credit for loss of service and a new gateway from the store with a sim card so I at least knew quality control was in place. I took the now 4th GW, 3rd sim card home and still had the dropouts (3/10). When I called in they informed me that there were yet again (3rd time) tower upgrades and would not complete until 3/31!! Since I will not be billed until April I told them I would give them until 4/1 and if it isn't working, I will cancel the service and get Verizon's home internet GW 4G or 5G service that works.
When this works, it is great but dealing with the incompetence and lies from the support team is infuriating since I work in high tech networking and know how to troubleshoot networks. They simply do not know what is causing the drops based on my experience and make things up. 10 weeks and 3 excuses saying the tower upgrades were complete and then not complete is enough so if it is not working by 4/1, they are clearly unable to deliver with 5G which is a major disappointment as a user that was an early adopter where it worked well on 4G.
I had the same problem with frequent disconnects. After reading up on the internet on similar problems, I purchased a cheap 4.5"x4.5" cooling fan on amazon. No more drops. Apparently when the modem gets a lot of use, it overheats and drops the connection. I placed the cooling fan on a cookie cooling rack (a screen that is about a half inch from the table) with the fan blowing toward the ceiling. Then place the T-Mobile modem on the fan. The fan has run 24-7 for about 7 months now. I just had Astound cable service hooked up for only $32/month and have now cancelled the Tmobile internet. Good luck cancelling T-mobile internet … it took numerous calls, as they were unable to locate my account even after I gave them the account number and assigned phone number as listed on my monthly wireless internet bills.
Okay I said I would update my prior post if it dropped the internet again, but guess what??? The fan fix solved the problem, or miraculously it fixed itself! I did find that merely sitting the tower on the fan didn't do anything, because the insides are constricted so it just pushed the air out the gap between the fan body and the gateway case. So I sealed that up with some curved plastic rims off of a frozen microwave meal tray. BOOM! Airflow established, and the case cooled down nicely. Tried to clean it up a little to look presentable, but hey it works.
Materials:
Noisy used 12 volt computer case fan
Dirty used 120vac to 9vdc adapter (makes the fan run quiet)
Feet for under the fan, and a 4.5 inch filter screen to not suck dust into the gateway
12dc automotive switch with LED indicator
Hot melt glue
Shrink tubing
Edges cut off of a Stouffer’s Lasagna microwave meal tray
More hot melt glue
Alcohol to clean off all the excess hot melt glue, LOLOne possible solution.
Background, we have 2 mobile phones, 2 tablets, 3 laptops, 2 TV, and 4 arlos cameras utilizing the internet.
It has been about a month since we signed up with the Tmobile 5G home service in Oct '22. The model of our black 5G tower is FAST-5688W. Yes, it is sensitive to placement and also the proximity to the Netgear Nighthawk wifi router, causing the 5G internet to randomly drop over the initial 8 days. The duration of the drops can last from 5 mins to forever. That is until I moved the Netgear wifi router 12+ inches further away instead of setting closely side by side. It has been almost 3 weeks of reliable internet since. We're very happy that T-Mobile is available in the mountains of Colorado. Subsequently we cancelled the Starlink reservation.I have had this issue on and off for the last several months of having 5G Home Internet. I got complacent and ordered a Keep Connect, which is a device that automatically power cycles your modem if internet is lost. It is up to 300+ resets in the past few months.
I called support today to see if there is anything else that can be done as it seems to be getting worse rather than better. The support was energetic and helpful and did have new reason for this issue. They said there is a 'fix' coming to firmware in a few weeks that has something to do with the 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz signals and devices switching back and forth. I was told I could manually separate devices onto either network to get instant results, but that sounded like too much work so I am gonna wait and hope a firmware fix is weeks away. Anyone else hearing this? Is it true?
@raphael I connected directly to the WiFi on the gateway at first. Then I heard that using a separate router and turning off the WiFi broadcasts from the gateway might help solve the dropout issue. Unfortunately, neither approach works for me. I continue to get dropouts regardless of whether I use the gateway independently or go through a separate router connected to the gateway via Ethernet cable.
I'm probably going to demand a refund as I'm 3 weeks into this 5G system and it's dropping wifi and lan at the same time disconnecting randomly. Speeds like you mentioned can be great regardless of the time of day but crap out when it's getting ready to disconnect. I have it connected direct to my high end Asus router/mesh for lan connections. Check this out though. I'm not connected but the app thinks I am. Look at the top status bar on my phone screen shot. Not connected to wifi.
