Slow Home Internet

iTinkeralot wrote:

With the secondary at -95 dBm it appears to have your RF in the "Mid Cell" for the signal. The primary is a bit of a weak signal but at least the secondary n71 is good. You might still try rotating the orientation of the router to influence the signal wash over the 5G antennas. I found the antenna orientation is an alternating pattern of the WIFI and 5G antennas. From the back side the 5G-1 is at 5 o'clock, 5G-2 is at 2 o'clock etc and the WIFI-1 is right at the back along with the LAN ports etc and WIFI-2 is at 3 o'clock along with the GPS and BT. WIFI-4 is at the front with 5G-2 at 2 o'clock. I discovered I could rotate the router to point the 5G-4 antenna at 7 o'clock toward the tower and improve the signal by several dBm. It is worth a little experimentation. See if you can get the coordinates of the towers where your signals originate. It will help you improve the placement possibly. Hopefully T-Mobile support has shared the actual location of the towers with you as it really does help to know. I am 5.3 miles line of sight of the tower that sends the 5G signal and I obtain speeds up to 153 Mb down and ~50 Mb up at times. It is more common to see 120 Mb down and 25-30 up but that is still not bad. Until I started really tinkering with placement I did not get the signals optimized. It also really helps if T-Mobile is not working on the tower equipment. For me that did account for some of the disruptions. You sound like you are aware of the signal values but here is a handy table I found that you might find useful to have about.

 

Thank you for your reply.

Sorry for the poor discription of my issue.  I was a bit concerned I may have run to many details together clouding what I was trying to convey.  My issue is with the replacement gateway I received about 4 weeks ago.  The secondary (5G) signal is weak.  What I currently have right now is: 

Primary (B66):  RSRP: -106 dBm, SNR: 13 dB, RSRQ: -11 dB.

Secondary (n71):  RSRP: -112 dBm, SNR: -1 dB, RSRQ: -14.

I have rotated the gateway a full 360 degrees looking for the best signal strength as well as the best quality.  I've tried to favor SNR and RSRQ over RSRP.  What I posted above is the best I can find.  Oddly, I get the same reading with the front of the Can at 0 degrees facing the tower and at 90 degrees (3 o'clock) to the tower.

As I stated, this is a replacement gateway.  The first gateway had better secondary signal performance (-95 dBm).  The 5G signal (n71) is a 600 MHz signal and I would think should perform better (penetration and range) than what I'm seeing with this replacement gateway.

I can't get a good 5G signal regardless of where I go in the house and how I rotate the Can.  As a result, the speeds have dropped off significantly.  And, to make it even more frustrating, occationally the speeds will come back up to close to what I had back in May, June, and then drop back down again.  And then there is the occational signal drop, sometimes the secondary, other times both requiring a reboot to re-establish a connection.

This is why I’m thinking I may have a faulty gateway that is not performing as it should.