Home internet speeds extremely inconsistent and connection drops intermittently

Machoo wrote:

We jumped on home internet service as soon as we heard about it. For a long time now, Comcast has been the only choice in Baltimore City and it feels like they squeeze city residents to subsidize lower prices for their customers in the counties where they have competition. Our current Comcast bill is just over $100 per month with their most basic service, a bundled Internet + TV. We don't even use the TV service but they wouldn't give us a plan with just internet service. This costs us about $110/month. I can plug my brother's address (he has  VZ Fios) in on the Comcast website and get offers for $39.99/month. I've been looking for a way to break free of Comcast for years now so I want to love this service but it's just not measuring up.

We had one of the mobile internet gateways delivered on 3/9. I started testing it immediately and was consistently getting speeds well over 300Mbps down on the first floor of my house. I even hit above 400Mbps a few times. So I went ahead and put that gateway at the head of the network, replacing the cable modem. The good speeds continued for a bit but, not long after that, I noticed the gateway would intermittently lose it's connection and the speed had dropped quite a bit. I've seen as low as 3Mbps down but that it generally stayed at just about 25Mbps. Checking the LCD at the top of the router, I could see that it was disconnected when our internet stopped working or that I had between 2-3 bars. I have 2 kids in school zoom meetings from 9am - 3:30pm and my wife and I are in and out of zoom meetings from 9am - 5pm. We were constantly getting disconnected due to the internet going down completely or due to the DSL speeds I haven't seen since 2005. WiFi in my house is problematic due to plaster walls and metal lath so I figured it had something to do with that.

I went to https://www.cellmapper.net/ and found the closest T-Mobile 5g tower was about 3.25 miles away. Luckily, my house is in one of the highest areas of the city and my 2nd floor bedroom window faces the nearest towers with a fairly unobstructed path to them. I drilled some holes and ran an ethernet cable down to the living room router. At this point, the gateway was sitting just far back enough from my bedroom window to avoid direct sunlight and had a pretty clear path to the closest tower. The display showed 4 bars consistently. However, the speed and connectivity issues persisted.

I just got off the phone with T-Mobile Home Internet tech support and got a line that seems a little too much of a coincidence when you take into account the other coincidences. The support rep asked me if I experienced this trouble before 3/9 because their engineers just started working on the tower I was connected to on 3/9 and it explains my trouble. I'm willing to wait for this work to be completed but he said it could take up to a month.

So these are the coincidences so far:

1. Most of the time, I get right around 25Mbps. It happens enough that the support rep was able to ask me to retry a speed test immediately after getting a <10Mbps speed test back and it would be >25Mbps. Then he'd say, "There you go. I made an adjustment and now you're getting 25Mbps, which is the base speed". The speed issue seems more like throttling since it's keeping me right at 25Mbps most of the time.
2. The problem I’m seeing started on the day I received the equipment and just happens to be affecting the only tower my gateway is connecting to.
3. The work their engineers are doing could take up to a month. Just enough time for them to charge me for another month before I cancel.

Maybe this is just paranoid me talking but I'm not trusting some of what I was told. I'd love to be wrong about this though. Anyone had a similar experience? Was it eventually fixed? How long did that take? My whole neighborhood is waiting to hear how this pans out. So many people are sick to death of Comcast that they may have to abandon Baltimore altogether once most of us jump ship for T-Mobile.

Rant over but I’d love to hear from people who’ve had similar experiences or who may have advice for improving my service.

Gracias,

Matt

I agree.  I am in Massachusetts and Comcast is screwing us big time.  I decided to try Tmob internet and was amazed.  Its just as good with weak signal (2 bars best I can get) as Comcast cable.  I couldn't believe it.   

Thank you for the cellmapper website. very useful. I was able to determine to which tower my gateway is connected just by looking at the PCI # and the band. In my case only the secondary signal is a 5G. Most of the time the gateway does not even connect to a secondary signal. My speeds are as high as 150 at 2am but as low as 1-2 Mbps during the day.

For those who don’t know already if the band starts with n (ex: n71) then it’s a 5G connection. if it starts with b its LTE.

In my case I mainly get LTE.

The Gateway has a miserable firmware and I cannot get the functionality I need. Can't access my security cameras or NAS from internet because of no port forwarding. My VoIP phone does not work because the firewall blocks the SIP ports and there is no way around it. VPN works.

Frankly this service is not worth 50$

Having exactly same problem with home internet. If it doesn't get fixed soon may have to go back to cable which I really don't want to do as I left them for a reason. Tm home internet Started out at about 100 to 200 mbps. Now it's about 20-30mbps and videos buffer all the time. My phones still get good speeds, the 5g phone gets 300-400mbps on speed test but my 5g home internet is only 20-30mbps. If management is throttling home internet to only 20-30 mbps then I'll have to leave b/c cable is 200+mbps or greater consistently. Was expecting to get similar service on home internet as I do on my phone but it isn't happening. Spending a lot of money with t mobile and expect high speeds on ALL devices all the time. Especially the home internet, which should be highest priority on their network as we use it for work, meetings, school etc... 

Got excited and switch to TMo 5G Internet. At first, the speeds were good, 50-150Mbps up, 25-60Mbps down. Then when I started using it on the daily basis, I started to notice it's very inconsistent. Sometimes both the down & up speeds are even lower than 1Mbps, especially starting around 6pm. The down speed does recover most of the time after a few minutes to an acceptable speed, usually 15-25Mbps, but the up speed often takes longer time to recover. Even when it recovers, it stays below 15Mbps. 

My tower signal is always 3 bar for 4GLTE b66, and 4 bar for 5G n71.
My previous provider Spectrum speed was always consistent 150+Mbps up & ~10Mbps down. 

I got my TMobile gateway today. Set up was quick and painless using the app but that's where the fun stopped. Performnce was disapointing: Latency in the 40 to 130msec, Download speed anywhere from 1.8 to 74 Mbps, Upload speed, consistently higher than download, anywhere from 5 to 80 Mbps. My home is less than ½ mile from the cell tower, signal is 4 bars anywhere in the house.

I spent over 2 hours with Tech support, running tests and collecting data. I was also told that by the end of the month, when work on the neighboring tower is completed (sounds familiar?), performance will improve. I asked for an escalation of my problem but no such group exists; the data collected will go directly to engineering and I'll hear back in a couple of days.

I am eager to dump Frontier and wanted this thing to work but, unless I see consistent performance (I’ll settle for a predictable 20 Mbps) I may have to look elsewhere.

I will update when I hear back from Support

Just hit 3 weeks of Tmob home internet and am not impressed. Constant dropouts while watching the tube. Slow loading internet pages. Less than 1 mbps download speeds between 4pm and midnight. Currently 0.12 mbps at 7 pm. Definitely not worth $50 a month. Spectrum cable just lowered their price to $49.95 a month. I'm ready to switch. 

Well, 4 weeks and 4 "Customer Support" sessions later, the silver cylinder is on its way back to TMobile. Despite the promises and good will of the front line support and their Manager, Engineering never really addressed the problem of dropped packets and inconsistent speeds. I think the two are closely related and, most likely, are a function of cell traffic. The nonsense "fixes" that Engineering came up with were: 1. Downgraded the speed to 50 Mbps and 2. Looked at the distance from the cell tower and the signal strength/quality. Since these criteria are OK then, I don't have any problem and case closed.

This thinking is so flawed in so many levels that I decided it was time for me to move on. So, for the time being, I am staying with my Frontier Fios (consistently 50/50Mbps, 9 msec ping). In a year or so I may give TMobile 5G another try.

Many people post about poor speed but never post there signal levels and readings. IMO 95% of the issues are signal quality that can be solved with an external antenna. It's really to bad the connection is not there by default.

Same here like everyone, home internet was working fine then started to slow down 👎👎👎

Nothing I do fixed, 007bondM16 mentioned an external antenna!!

Never heard that there is an external antenna, where you can get it? How to get it? Price?

Anyone knows??

Pucheco wrote:

Same here like everyone, home internet was working fine then started to slow down 👎👎👎

Nothing I do fixed, 007bondM16 mentioned an external antenna!!

Never heard that there is an external antenna, where you can get it? How to get it? Price?

Anyone knows??

Ah ask.

https://www.waveform.com/products/mimo-panel-kit-for-hotspots-routers?variant=39349359476839

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