Hugely variable speeds

I'm having similar issues. I've been with t mobile for over 30 years, on the 5G internet plan for over a year. I'm talking home wifi. I've had download speeds of over 200 and speeds of 5. Upload speed over 30 and at other times .04.  I also have a computer directly connected to the router.  I assume they are doing work on the tower or something.  I've tried to troubleshoot to see if it varies with weekday vs weekend, or time of day. There is some variance based on highg demand times but nothing radical. I've tried rebooting everything,  router, phone computer. If using the phone for testing I'm standing next to the router. And, as mentioned,  the computer is hard wired with ethernet cable.  

I live in the Great Bridge area of Chesapeake near Oscar Smith high school.  

I guess I'm the exception here. My TM 5G is meeting/exceeding my expectations.

For over 10 years I was grandfathered into a legacy status with Time Warner. Spectrum finally found a way to force me to upgrade.

As a legacy customer I got 50 MB down and 5 MB up that in reality was 60 down and 6 up. Yes, that improved to 200 (240) down and 10 (12) up with the large price increase.

So, my frame of reference is 60 down and 6 up.

My gateway seems to have locked onto band B2 for 4G and switches (for whatever reason) between bands N41 and N71 for 5G.

Downloads are 100-150 on N41 and 250-350 on N71.

Uploads are around 70 on N41 and 30 on N71.

I want to do offsite backups and 5x worst case and 12x faster best case, makes me every happy and whatever download speeds I get are fast enough for my needs.

I can't see any tower from my house but the gateway is on the second floor with a window toward the one tower available to me. I consistently get 4 bars. The gateway has been running for 13+ days now with no known total outages.

I mainly come here to complain, but also to seek solutions, so I appreciate people like you who are willing to share your technical knowledge with us to help find such solutions.

Internet delivered via cell signal does seem to have more complications that the end user must seek out the cause and solution to than my previous cable internet, but I'm willing to put in the work if I only know what I should do. My previous cable internet still tries to lure me back with much lower prices than I'm paying now, but like you, I am turned off by all the small print that adds fees here and there and then requires you to call back each year to beg them to extend the good prices or else they go much higher than the simple price I'm paying now.

If I can just get the service to work acceptably 90% of the time, I’m willing to keep it to keep from going back to cable internet and their own version of outages, plus creeping prices.

I will not argue over the difficulty to obtain reliable service. Poor service delivery is NOT a universal experience. If all new TMO home internet users had significant problems the the Community forum servers would choke. There are now over 1 million T-Mobile home internet users. How does one KNOW for sure the actual percentage of users that have significant problems getting the service stable? Sure T-Mobile has taken an aggressive move to take market share and shake up the playing field. If subscribers want predictable then research and go with the vendor that has a history of excellence. The Nokia GW and the Arcadyan GW are not perfect and each does have its drawbacks. I was hopeful the second generation gateway appliance T-Mobile provided would be a significant upgrade but that is not the case. So, yes some decisions made rely upon less than mature technology but that is not uncommon in the industry. I worked in the high tech industry for a major vendor for 22 years so it is nothing new to me. The competition in high tech is fierce and vendors tend to be aggressive about product/services rollout. 

Users have the freedom to go to AT&T and Verizion or some other carrier and get service. They can agree to a contract, more fees, data caps, and what not and possibly have a more predictable result. I don't like the obscure fees that add up with the other vendors and the misleading offers. The T-Mobile solution has not been perfect as we have had a couple of very unstable periods but I joined the home internet cellular solution in the BETA phase so I knew it could be rocky. After 15 months there have been two disruptions and the rest of the time it has been a very good solution. It is 10X the DSL solution we had previously for less costs and the cost of the prior solution was going up every 6-12 months. So far $50/month has been a positive change. Living in a rural area gave us only Hughes Net as an option and I do not consider that an opción. That is desperation. OK so Star Link was another but way out of my budget and I have found from a SL subscriber down the road 2 doors that it is NOT perfect either. Go figure; that is another new delivery system that has been pushed out fast.

I post to the community, as I do, to offer information and suggestions that can help a user with signal problems. It seems to make the effort and time more satisfying. People think it is just as simple as a hard line but that is NOT the case. There are too many variables with cellular distribution. There are enough people complaining. I prefer to not complain and rather contribute as possible.

This is poppycock! It should not be this hard to get reliable service from a company who says they have the best 5G network! There are just too many people having the same issues, so it must be T-Mobile's network that in not functioning. I used to have their 4G LTE gateway and it was very reliable and the speed was acceptable.

I think they rolled out 5G too soon. Now they are using us as their testing and debugging  lab.

That is curious. So, with the "normal" speeds the RSRP reflects a weaker signal power but speed improves. The lack of SINR values does not help. Do you know 100% sure the signal in each case is on the same frequency with the same cell origination for the signals? It sort of looks like the router is making a transition from one source to another and back. Identify the PCI values for the 4G & 5G signals  in each case and see if they are changing. If the gateway is switching back and forth between cells that might account for the inconsistent behavior. It is much easier to get the info with the Nokia GW vs the Arcadyan GW so knowing which is in service might help. It might be possible there is work being done on the tower(s) in the area and that is causing the disruptions or maybe there are load issues. It is hard to tell with just the current data. 

Does the change take place fast and at frequent intervals or does the service change with delay and then also do so at frequent intervals? I know you state in a matter of minutes so this is a very frequent behavior that just persists or what? 

Using the PCI values you should locate the tower(s) with cellmapper.net and determine distance to the tower(s) around you and which one(s) the PCI, physical cell identifiers originate the signal from.

And now we're back to "normal" speeds with almost no change in details.

LTE:

-14

-104

1

5G:

-13

-111

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