Significant Drop off in home internet speed

Timsw wrote:

It'd be a business practice doomed to fail if Tmobile started even 25% of their customers on good speed, and then throttled them down to a tiny fraction of what they were getting. They'd lose thousands of customers, and there would be at least a few dozen complaints daily on this board. I've read of a few dozen people who got good speeds for months, and then a dropoff so bad they had to leave the service. But that's it -- a few dozen out of well over 100,000 users. It's probably closer to 300,000. 

But given that 5G home internet is a relatively new service, and you were a pioneer, one of the first 100,000 in the US to be on it back in February, it’s a given that they are rapidly expanding the number of users and doing some tower tuning and upgrades, which could potentially affect the service of a small percentage of existing customers adversely -- I’m guessing less than 5% but it could be more like 2%.

During tower work, let's say they're replacing a n71 antenna/transceiver with the more desirable n41, they could be shifting customers on that tower to another tower, turning the power down during the work, or tuning the equipment differently. Any of these three things might affect your service adversely.

Think of the tower antennas as radiating in 360 degrees. You might just happen to be in the one degree line or wedge of air space that is tuned differently after an equipment change or some kind of maintenance, which has left you in a dead zone compared to what you were in.

I agree that it's really unfortunate that when they're working on a tower, they can't give customers an email warning and an estimate of when the work will be done. But the fact is they have no way of knowing this sometimes. They don't know who will be affected. It's not like DSL where the phone company could do a test on your line to determine if the problem is at their main line, or something going on with your modem or wiring at your house. The transmission to your house is happening in T mobile's air space, not on a wire, so they can't trace it. No blinking light goes on when your service may get cut completely. That only happens in the backhaul, where the tower/wireless joins with the fiber cables to the main internet hub.

Instead, they have a general idea of what tower(s) you are connecting to, and should have some kind of schedule of what work is being done on the tower(s). With some towers though, they are shared by one or more other companies, and who knows how that affects the other antennas on the tower, when they are doing such work?

I wonder how much they respond to a single customer’s problem alone, or whether they are more like the phone and electrical companies, that prioritize the magnitude of the problem by number of customers in the area affected.

The way that would work in T mobile home internet is if they get service calls from other T mobile home internet customers in your geographical area, the coverage degree or slice you are in, then they would be more inclined to see they have a problem. They can't just lower the speed to 1/5 of what it was and leave hundreds of customers like that for weeks without them discontinuing their service and going with something more reliable.

This is all speculation, based on my reading of how cell service, upgrades, and maintenance work.

What I think can potentially help when you call the service department as you have, is to be able to give them as much specific data as you can, as concisely and clearly as you can, preferably about your connection before and after that problem. That means using the GUI and finding out what bands you are on. A drop in speed as big as yours points to the possibility of connecting to a 4G primary-only connection, compared to the usually faster 4G/5G Primary/Secondary non-standalone signal pair that constitutes the current state of 5G.

I agree that them just telling you that you live in an area without a good signal makes no sense, since they were saying you were in a good signal area before and you got good speed for months.

And if you haven’t tried it, after seeing what bands you are on, if you are on the 4G Primary only, you might try repositioning your gateway to see if there’s anywhere in your house that you can get the 5G Secondary band and a faster speed back.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about with the GUI, click on my badge (blue circle with T in it) to the left and read some of my other posts where I explain in detail how to use the GUI.

If you haven't watched them, watch the videos of the YouTube vlogger "Nater Tater" on T mobile home internet. He explains how to use the GUI, how to find what tower you are connecting to and how far away it is. Again, knowing all this stuff can help you give the T mobile service person more information.

 

yeah i've checked the GUI, i have been on 4G primarily since last week when the problem started, Haven't connected to 5G since. I did send a tweet to the T Mobile helpdesk and CEO and apparently got their attention since i received a response within 30 minutes. They have told me that they escalated the problem to a different service area that can better pinpoint the problem. But what they have told me so far is consistent with what you said about them upgrading the tower. I live in a suburb/semi rural area with limited options for other providers and I suspect that they are focusing on adjacent areas with higher density of customers or potential customers.