Forum Discussion
Home internet modem keeps powering down and restarting
So, we had the Tmobile modem(the 5g tower... black box) for a few weeks now... worked great at first but now it continues to shut down every few minutes and restart. If it does it long enough I have...
If it is rebooting like that it might be the power adapter or the gateway has a problem. Contact support or touch base with a local T-Mobile store to see if you can get a replacement. I would see if they will provide both but try the power adapter on the original gateway before you swap the SIM card out etc… Reduce variables to know if it is only the power adapter. That is if you really want to know.
I got the T-Mobile black tower home internet box a week ago and am having the same problem where it restarts multiple times a day.
I wrote a powershell script that uses SpeedTest by Ookla’s command line interface (https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli) to test the connection as well as the download and upload speeds every 2 minutes. Using this script I noticed that before every restart the speeds starting slowing down considerably. This is the exact same thing that happens on some of my Android TV boxes when they start overheating. Which leads me to believe that it is an overheating issue here as well. Even though the tower doesn't really feel hot, there may be something in the firmware or hardware that considers a very low temperature to be an overheating issue, and triggers a reboot.
At any rate I put a fan right next to the box and since then it restarts far less. It still does restart occasionally, which is not good, but it seems to help a lot.
Hopefully they will come up with a firmware or hardware upgrade that fixes this soon.
Here is a snippet of my script output that shows what I mean.
Date Time DownloadSpeed UploadSpeed PacketsLost Network
2023-04-28 00:34:04 349.39 26.84 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:36:04 413.75 35.93 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:38:04 383.65 32.87 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:40:04 83.70 9.90 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:42:04 49.53 10.37 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:44:04 85.79 7.78 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:46:04 76.48 13.91 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:48:04 0.00 0.00 0 This is where it was restarting.
2023-04-28 00:50:04 448.74 30.52 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:52:04 410.20 31.71 0 T-Mobile USA
2023-04-28 00:54:04 341.53 33.74 0 T-Mobile USA
