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.
After my first month with no issues I'm unfortunately on the same boat as many of you in these posts. My first non issue month was too good to be true now these connection drops are becoming the norm.
Thanks for the heads up. I just checked and apparently did get upgraded. I will have to run some tests this weekend.
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.
Hi. Around super bowl I had one disconnect a day. Streaming froze up once. It was stable for 5 days without disconnect. Able do a little streaming without problems. No buffering. Not a problem to reboot the router once a week. As you found I doubt any of what you tries was the problem. More likely this is how Tmobile is handling traffic off of there servers. When it does disconnect the wifi signal and lye and 5g signals are good (2 -3 bars) but there is no data coming in. This is a problem if not home as can not reboot the router remotely only if at home on wifi. I believe Tmobile can reboot the router remotely however as some have said. Right now things are fairly stable. There was a firmware update recently that may have helped??? Also remember that Tmobile can reduce speeds if you use more than 50-100 FBI per month. This might be effecting your ability to stream at a high rate.
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.
@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.
@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.
