Home internet modem keeps powering down and restarting

Same problems here.  I had mine for months with no problem, fast, no rebooting.  Then a couple of months ago it started rebooting once sometimes twice a day.  Called and got a replacement NOK silver cylinder tower.  It wasn't too long that the second unit started rebooting.  Then on a day where it rebooted 5 times while I was WFH, the rep said they were working on my tower and that it was a one day maintenance.  Several days later after more rebooting, I called back and the rep said that the maintenance was scheduled for 2 months and would end the next Friday.  Don't know why one rep said one day and the other said 2 months.  But they also sent me a new power adapter to try.  So I limp along til that Friday, and it was still rebooting.  Got the new plug and installed and after the maintenance is supposedly done, its still rebooting when I look at it wrong.  Yesterday though I worked all day and didn't notice any rebooting.  I start watching HBO Max and 3 times in 20 minutes it rebooted.  Switched to Netflix and watched an entire movie with no issue.  I only have 2 bars signal strength because I'm 2 miles from the closest tower.  But I have no other option except to pay thousands of dollars to get the cable company to extend to my home.

tronguy123 wrote:

Um. I'm an electrical engineer. I troubleshoot hardware for a living, at least until recently when I retired.

Brand new T-Mobile Gateway, the tall, square in cross-section one. Started seeing $RANDOM dropouts, once every couple of hours, as soon as the thing was put in use.

On day, happened to be in the office upstairs where the thing was placed, down went the internet. Looked over, screen says, "Powering Up". There had been no power outages whatsoever. When it came back up, so did the internet.

Four hours later, lather, rinse, repeat. Called T-Mobile support. After the usual five minute wait, talked to a nice service rep.

Se said it was clearly a problem with the gateway. AND that that particular brand (the tall one) was known to have this problem. Drop shipped me a new one on a Friday, got it on this last Monday. Opened the box: Same rough shape (square in cross-section) but shorter than the original. Set it up. No more drop-outs.

Did have to swap the SIM card from the intermittent one to the new one, but that was it, beyond the usual setup follies.

Could be the power brick. But, speaking as a troubleshooter: I've seen hardware that does stuff like this. A fair number of reasons. Overtemperature on some device that causes excessive current draw; reset sensor whose voltage thresholds are too high/too low, so it causes a reset; bad parts in manufacturing that short out intermittently; and so on. I note that it took a while before it started doing this in my case, at least four or five hours. Most factories power up their equipment, sometimes in a heat tent, with the intent of detecting early failures. So this looks like a factory escapee: Should have been caught during testing, but worked long enough to ship.

There’s this general idea: One can do a mucho of testing when one builds a product. Testing the circuit board, lot testing individual components, testing the assembled board before putting it in the box, testing the complete box after assembly (functional test), and, of course, heat tank testing. If one is getting 99%+ yields at a particular test step and there's decent fault coverage, it's often cost-effective to skip some tests and use others. This works if one's suppliers provide low-fault batches of hardware; one pays more for that, but then gets to skip hiring people and mounting test stations, so it's an interesting balance for the manufacturing engineer.

But there are pointy-haired bosses who just love skipping testing steps in the interests of low costs.. and this smells of that.

Im actually a network engineer of 10 years ( still in the field) other than the unit being bad/power brick these devices  Ive found have issues in general with tech 4/5 years older. whenever I have issues its because im using my old laptop, if I dont use it or one of my old test pcs its completely fine with my 2023 laptop/desktop/ phone. super odd guessing its something to do with maybe non wifi 6 enabled devices or non 5ghz supported devices

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

I am on my 3rd gateway in less than 2 months.

I am so angry wasting my time going to the T-Mobile store. I have 3 young kids and a 8 month pregnant wife.

Why can't this crap just work. I have never experienced this many problems with anything in my whole life and I'm almost 50!!! 

TMobile please get your sh#t together asap.

One more chance this one fails I am throwing it through the window of my TMobile store.

We've had the same rebooting itself problems for over 2 months. On our 2nd modem, router whatever the hell you call it and they said I should get another one!  Nope, going back to AT&T, this is totally unacceptable!  AT&T offers a big discount on home internet for lower incomes anyway and since we're retired and meet the lower income level, it's a no brainer to switch.

paraguin wrote:

Thanks for this thread, I have only had the Sagemcom for less than a week and it suddenly started rebooting itself every 15-30 minutes based on the alerts I was getting off the firewall.  (Just note, I am still running dual WAN between Cable and T-Mobile Home Internet. So that's why I can still email myself alerts off the firewall.)

I decided to give it a whirl and switch out the stock power adapter to my Anker USB-C (up to 100 watts) adapter I use with my laptops. The stock one says it is 15 watts.  The cycle of rebooting for me stopped.  After a few hours, I switched it over to a leftover Chromebook USB-C wall adapter that is good for 45 watts.  No hiccups or issues after a few more hours that I've seen thus far.  

I’ll edit / post an update if anything else comes up, but the recommended solution definitely was worth a try for me. 

 

  

This worked for me.  I had another Samsung 45w charger laying around, and used it for the Sage, and it has fixed the reboot issues it was doing!  I am assuming the adapter is not giving enough power for the amount of bandwidth we are demanding on the units.  I've seen this before with a portable mifi and this fixed it too.  

The other problem with t-mobile is if you have Hulu Live.  T-Mobile doesn't work with it because it uses dynamic IP addresses, you need a static IP for it to work. T-Mobile Hulu Live uses your location by IP address and when T-Mobile changes it with these reboots you lose the Live feature.  Done with T-Mobile internet. 

OK I am using the silver/gray Nokia round router and also was having the same reboot issue.

after some research and after thought about how I set the unit up it realized I may have made a mistake optimizing it for gaming. 

Unit worked fine for months, almost a year. Then I started having the reboots.

Basically I just went back to router set both 2.4 and 5 G local network to Auto channel select to eliminate any conflicts with any local area network devices. and then set both channel transmitting power to 75 %.

Seems to be working.

If the units are overheating reducing transmit power reduces heat generation.

Try it and let me know. I repost if anything changes.

Left T-mobile internet, which worked great the whole first year we had it. Went to AT&T and now have free interment thanks to the Affordable Connectivity program (ACP) and no issues. 

What's really weird is I had the Nokia gateway for two plus years with zero issues besides if network was down. I switched to sagecom 5866 and now have zero issues for over 2 weeks. Was told by tech support Nokia gateway had reboot /firmware issues pending Nokia to push them through. Had to call twice to get gateway replaced at local store cause call center would only send me what I was sending back(Nokia). Cx service call ed store because previous call history to reach out to local store for swap)Got 2 replacement Nokia gateways once it installed new firmware automatically same prob(1-2 hours) Now no issues and 4/5 bars as opposed to 3. Each 3 gateways they offer are better for certain geo locations. Just my experience