Forum Discussion
Signal strength VAPORIZED. More downtime with T-Mobile Home Internet than I've ever had with any other ISP.
I got sick of the constant downtime that I experienced with Cox every time a tropical storm came through Louisiana, so I decided to give T-Mobile a try. There's no phone lines to fall down so the internet is always up, right? And since I already have 4 phone lines and 3 cellular devices with T-Mobile, it seemed like the right course of action and the price was attractive, although I would GLADLY PAY MORE for faster data (I can keep dreaming, right?)
WRONG.
T-Mobile home internet goes down like 5 times a day. I used to call it in but it happens now so frequently that it's a waste of time. They would tell me they're doing actualizaciones and to wait it out, toggle the power switch on/off and it usually came back on in 3-4 minutes. I stuck with T-Mobile thinking those "upgrades" would pay off, but they haven't and it's actually taken a turn for the worse. The outages are now lasting between 5-10 minutes and on top of that, I have an entirely new problem that didn’t exist before: LOW SIGNAL STRENGTH.
For 7 months, my gateway has been sitting in the same exact place. It's positioned right in front of the window, on top of 4 milk crates because it's the only place in the house where I can get 4 bars, but that's all come to an end because all of the sudden, out of nowhere, I only gets 2 bars now. This happened about 4 days ago and I haven't moved any furniture or anything, it just dropped from 4 bars to 2 and there's no other place in the house where I can get a decent signal. The only way I can get 3 bars, is IF I TAKE IT OUTSIDE.
What's strange is that the symptoms are not consistent. Sometimes the cellular will go out on all my devices (which makes sense if T-Mobile is working on the tower) but other times, it's just the home internet that goes down. It's about 50/50. Do gateways just go bad? Is there any kind of extender?
Is it still working?
Vamp wrote:
For 7 months, my gateway has been sitting in the same exact place. It's positioned right in front of the window, on top of 4 milk crates because it's the only place in the house where I can get 4 bars, but that's all come to an end because all of the sudden, out of nowhere, I only gets 2 bars now. This happened about 4 days ago and I haven't moved any furniture or anything, it just dropped from 4 bars to 2 and there's no other place in the house where I can get a decent signal. The only way I can get 3 bars, is IF I TAKE IT OUTSIDE.
Since you have had your gateway for 7 months, it is assumed you have the Nokia gateway.
I had nearly the same problem, where it worked fine for months, and then suddenly dropped internet connections continually. It was due to the gateway switching the 5G band from n41 to n71, making an unstable connection. No matter what I did (rebooting, restarting), the gateway stayed on n71.
I finally decided to remove the battery, and then restarted the gateway. It chose band n41 again, and has been up without any problems for about a month now.
Apparently, the battery retains the current band selection even when rebooting / restarting, but when the battery is removed, the gateway is forced to select the bands from scratch.
Having similar issues the past few days. Works fine during the day I'm getting 3 bars. Then in the evening, when the Sun goes down it drops to 2 bars. I think they are intentionally lowering the tower's output power at night to lower their electric bill.
Which gateway do you have? If it's Nokia (cylinder), many users have reported degrading performance due to overheating. If this is happening to you, I would ask TMobile for a new Arcadyan gateway.
