Forum Discussion
Intermittent Service t-Mobile 5G
I just received my 5G gateway and have set this up. I'm a software engineer with a solid knowledge of electronics and telecoms but I'm not up to date with latest stuff.
Anyway I have the device setup, we also have ADSL but I want to explore 5G so I subscribed to see how it behaves.
I have a single PC cabled into the gateway, nothing else in the house communicates (yet) with the gateway (my phone does talk to the gateway over wifi to inspect it, but that’s all).
I got a 3bar signal and set the unit on my desk and it seemed OK, very much faster than ADSL.
But after an hour I began to get randomly "No internet" and the device had disconnected. This has been the case for the past two hours now. Up then down like 10 mins, 5 mins, 2 mins, 8 mins uptime then brief loss of connection.
The 3bar signal strength seems steady.
There are a primary and secondary signals reported on the web page that proves the gateway.
Does anyone have any idea what lies behind these disconnects?
My zip is 85207 and all indications are we have “5G Ultra Capacity” I am a few miles away from various buttes that have lots of towers, one is west of me and during the setup my phone indicated a signal source west of me, so I’m assuming that tower is the location of the signal.
Because of these buttes and my proximity to them and no tall buildings around I’d assumed I was advantageously placed.
So what to do? I can see numerous threads about this from other people, is the service really that poor?
My ADSL - though much slower - has no reliability issues, up 24/7.
I have not seen any conversations where users have reported issues with the wired Ethernet ports. That is not to say there could not be one. I have not seen any posts as such. Make sure the Ethernet cable is secure in the RJ45 port. It might be a driver issue or just a cable that has a RJ45 connector that does not mate well with the RJ45 port on the Nokia. Having out of spec connectors is usually when a connector is not made per the specifications where a manufacturer does not have good controls. It could be a problem with the gateway Ethernet module. It would be a strange one. I would expect to see errors on the statistics if that were the case.
I can understand the frustration with the intermittent disruptions and buffering. We had a couple of episodes like that but the problems were resolved. If the service in your area is a newer deployment they may still be working on the towers. That is when such behavior is fairly common. Unfortunately they dont provide any prior notification related to maintenance work being performed.
The standard for gigabit Ethernet requires CAT 5e or better. I prefer to run CAT 6 cables and all my cables are high quality build by a reputable manufacturer. OK, so I do have a couple that might be Cat 5e but no Cat 5 now. I tossed all those.
Check the statistics and see if there are “Sent or Receive Errors” or discards on the wired connection.
I have firmware version 1.2104.00.0286 running and I use both LAN interfaces with Ethernet switches and have at least 6-7 wired clients plus wireless clients but I have seen no behavior like that.
I'm getting ready to dump this horribly inconsistent service.. can't take it anymore. I've had both the arcadyan and the Nokia.. the service sucks and is intermittent at its best. Makes streaming impossible.
OK so if you had no issues with the DSL modem with the cable what is the client? Windows, Apple, Linux? What is the network card? Realtec or Intel, any idea? If windows pull up system information. Check the driver. Maybe the client NIC has a driver issue. If you have another PC connect the two back to back with the same cable and give both IP addresses so they can talk. Then run a constant ping between the two and see if they stay up and stable for a test.
I started a thread:
The cables are all purchased and several have been used today (not because I suspected a problem with them).
I’ll do some more testing in a minute, it could conceivably be the cables….
Well, keep in mind the LED bars on the router are generic and the cellular metrics are where you can dial it in. With your location roughly ½ mile from the n41 you should get some pretty good speeds. Use speedtest.net and fast.com and get some speed results. The T-Mobile solution uses the secondary 5G signal for downloads and the 4G LTE for uploads so I would expect to see poor uploads and higher latency and jitter on the 4G. Having some data related to performance, speed might be good. With the clean signal to the n41 you should get pretty impressive download speed.
So, what category of cable are you using? Is the Ethernet cable fabricated in a facility or home built?
This is quite insane. I now have my desktop cabled to the gateway on a LAN port and at the same time my Surface connected to the gateway over wifi. The device using WiFi sees a stable service, the PC see's the connection going up/down, up/down…
What the heck is going on...
The LAN cable is 35 ft long but I had the same issue this morning with a cable just 4 ft long so I doubt its cable or cable length. The same 4ft cable is used to connect to DSL modem anyway and that has no issues.
That manual says
The Connection screen is the first that is displayed after on boarding is successful. The Connection screen displays the RSRP of 4G/LTE and 5G signals. The title of the screen is "CONNECTION". The bars indicate the signal strength. The RSRP of 5G signal is shown when there is only 5G connection (in SA mode). The strongest RSRP signal (4G and 5G) are shown when both 4G and 5G connections are established.
Yet I see in the web UI that the 5G signal has 4 bars and the 4G has 3 bars, yet the display on the top of the unit shows 3 bars!
A huge weakness with this Nokia gateway is the lack of logs or counters. With my ADSL modem I can see a huge amount of details like how many DSL link losses to date or past 24 hours and so on. There's no way to find out from the Nokia if we've lost and regained a connection because there's no history, none that I can find anyway.
Another gripe is the location of the status display. Having that on the top is crazy because one must be looking down on it to see the signal strength, pretty hard to do if one is situating it high up in a room.
