Forum Discussion
Home internet 5G but only 4G signal
Hi. I recently signed up for T-Mobile home internet 5G. The map said I was in extended 5G range. Unless I stand on a ladder in the attic I cannot get a consistent 5G signal. I do get a strong 4G....
So from the table we can see cell EDGE for both signals so very weak 4G & 5G signals. According to that there is a bit of noise on the 5G. That is the n71 band so it is a lower 5G gigahertz band not the n41 millimeter band which would be nice to get as it can be much faster. The B2 4G LTE is ok but not really strong enough for proper service. The problem appears to be the distance to the tower and cellular sources. Without additional metrics it is impossible to determine more. The PCI information, if the application provides it, would be useful as then we could find the cell using cell mapper.net and then use google maps to plot the distance to the tower that has the specific cell. Best guess I would say the tower that actually delivers those signals is at least 6 to 6.5 miles away or the power of each is rather low.
My take is the speeds recorded are slow but the specifics of the signal strength, signal quality and signal to noise ratio are not known. I just speculate you only have a couple of bars on the LED screen maybe and not more. If all it is connecting to is 4G LTE then that is still a rather meh… speed even for 4G LTE. I usually have 3 bars and good to excellent metric values on my gateway and uploads can be 35-70 Mbs and downloads can be 175-350 Mbs a good part of the time. It depends on the time of day and traffic load on the cells. Still single digit 4G LTE is slow.
Get on a browser with a good connection and goto CellMapper.net and find the 4G and 5G towers in the area. If your gateway reports the PCI physical cell identifier then you can locate the cell and better position your gateway. It will take some experimentation and probably using an upper level with a location close to or in a window to improve the reception.
