Need real tech support for 5g download problems

Snoozecat wrote:

So far I have used a little less than 1GB of data.

Don't think 1GB of data (which is 20% of a DVD) will get you in trouble.  Even 1TB probably won't.

Here's some recent data showing a 2 hour + outage last night.  I collected these data by running speedtest.net's CLI app every 15 minutes,.  The periods of very high download speed are usually about four AM, and he outage shown by the flat spot on this graph is from about 9:30PM to midnight.

What does anyone make of the wild swings here?  I'd love to stay with the wireless internet, but the outages are really not acceptable.  In my area the carrier choices are Spectrum, the T-Mobile 5g shown here, and 10Mbps DSL,  I have the DSL and although it is slow, it is almost never out or failing to maintain the rated (sad) speed.  I have had very bad experiences with Spectrun in the past.

Any ideas how I might approach T-Mobile for some tech support here above the “reboot the can” checklist I can get from the Indian CSRs?

TMO rep called me up about a week ago.  Not sure what prompted that, likely routine sales call.  I explained the sad story shown above and he indicated that TMO engineering was working on my nearest cell site and that the work would be complete on Mar 8.

Last night (Mar 8) was a bit better, in that the usual dip to approximately zero Mbps was much shorter and recovered more quickly than many other times one can see in these data. 

But I think I see a clear pattern.  TMO Wireless Home Internet runs pretty well most days, and for the insomniacs out there, 2-4AM looks fantastic.  But come the traditional peak hours, say 7:30PM to midnight, download speeds just melt away. 

My regrettable conclusion is that the home internet is badly oversold in my location (central Florida) and that the network as it stands today just can't handle the load.  So in the interest of prioritizing voice and SMS and who-knows-what other customer groups, the 5g wireless internet is throttled down to zero. 

There is quite a lot of legalease and weasel-wording on the throughput commitments explained on the Open Internet pages, but nowhere did I see that 5g Home Internet customers would be completely shut off during peak times.  This is unacceptable.

For reference, here the last twenty or so days of download speeds, as reported by running speedtest.net:

Now I'm getting hour+ long complete drop outs, suspiciously during peak evening time.  Sad to say I have come to believe that TMO just throttle the Home Internet customers down to zero when the network gets loaded.  Not exactly as advertised.

The spikes are speed tests (speedtest.net) running every 15 minutes. The outage, indicated by the complete zero baseline samples is from about 8:30PM EDT to 11:00 PM.  Regrettably this has occurred on several nights lately.

Gee, this is a great place to talk to oneself…

Latest graph occasioned by a complete outage beginning about 10:45pm, tonight, March 28th.  I am still running speed tests, against speedtest.net, but in the interest of conserving bandwidth, I have cut those back to every 15 minutes.

Hoping to get finer-grained data with less total data transfer, I began tracking ping times to Google once a minute, averaging 5 pings.  That graph is interesting, too.

X scale is the date measured, and the Y is the average of 5 pings.  While ping is surely an imperfect measure of network performance, notice the clusters of time when ping times exceed 500Ms, up to 1,000Ms  on some occasions. 

I am still crunching the data, but I want to overlay the speedtest results on this ping time graph.  My guess is that times of low or no download speed will align with occasions when the ping times are inordinately long.  If that is so, I can scale back the download speed tests and just use the ping times.  That would be handy.

Of course it is not clear to me that anyone at TMO actually cares about the performance of their latest and greatest product offering, but who knows...

Are you on the Nokia router or T-Mobile's newer router offering the Arcadyan router. If you are on the Arcadyan then having proper reporting is not there so it would be near impossible to determine much about the cellular connections. If you are on the Nokia router at least it would provide some metrics for the primary and secondary cellular signals. You can determine the 4G LTE and 5G NR cellular signals and also see the signal parametric values with the Nokia router at least. 

If you are using the newer Arcadyan router getting information from T-Mobile support about the channels and the towers is pretty much the only way to know more. The generic LED bars on the routers are of limited value so without knowing how strong and clean the signaling is it is hard to provide much in the way of suggestions. From the behavior you have reported it appears there is most likely work being done on the tower equipment or it is poorly managed. Since you have only ben a T-Mobile subscriber for a couple of weeks I would assume you have the Arcadyan router. Not much data can be obtained from that router so providing substantial answers is probably not going to be possible. If you can find out more about the tower and the signaling you might be able to make some headway but it will be a challenge and very frustrating if they are working on the tower.

Other subscribers with the Arcadyan router are beginning to see firmware updates. Some have reported improvements in operation. It is hard to determine how much due to runtime is not well established. It might be useful to contact T-Mobile and tell them what firmware/software your router is running and see if an update can be pushed to the router. 

Some reported 1.00.12 on the router initial and some have had 1.00.14 and 1.00.16 pushed. It might be helpful to try an update but you can't install it yourself. T-Mobile has to push it.