Slow 4G connection only, but only sometimes -- SOLVED

blue240sx44 wrote:

Well for me its primary b71 with no secondary during daytime hours. this is basically useless and doesnt hardly load a webpage and wont perform a speedtest without timing out.

At night time i connect to b66/n71 on this i get around 10 mbps nothing stable though i have gotten 40-50 mbps but rarely also the upload is .05-.5 mbps really horrible and the ping times are 800.

it seems like they really throttle the connection or kick you off towers or something nothing really works with any sort of reliability sometimes it doesnt work at night as well or its only after midnight -5 am its actually ridiculous ive spent countless hours moving this thing all over the place i even rigged up a fan mounted to the bottom idk 

losing hope

I can see why you're losing hope. I'll be frank and say it sounds kind of hopeless. You didn't mention your signal strength or your distance to the tower, and how many obstructions there are between the tower and you. Are you city or rural?

The only hope is that they are doing tower work, or have temporarily shifted you to a tower that is farther away and it will be this slow until the work is done. This is a slim chance, but it is possible. Call T mobile and ask if that is what is happening at your tower. Leave your number for the callback instead of waiting two bloody hours to speak to someone. (I just happened to have called them once, but it was about my account, to make sure  I was on autopay.)

Yeah, a ping of over 150 is bad, and if it is frequently over that into ping like 800, that will make your connection lag, stop, and be unusable most of the time. They are not throttling your speed. That would not influence ping.

Assuming there is no work being done on the tower, there is a possibility you're in a dead zone with a lot of interference. This interference can be caused by overlapping signals from two towers, or something like a nearby electrical power station.

Do you have a 4G smartphone, and what provider is it, and what kind of speed were you getting with that?

If you were getting a speed of over 30 on a 4G smartphone, or better yet, were able to find someone with a T mobile 5G smartphone who could do a speed test in your house and got good speeds on 5G, I would say that could point to something being wrong with your gateway.

But reading about people’s experiences, and the ones who tried getting another gateway before giving up, it rarely is the gateway that is the problem.

I have my own story about encountering a dead zone, at my brother's house. He is much closer to a t-mobile tower than I am. According to their coverage map, both T mobile's 4G and 5G are a level better than what I can expect in my location. I went to his house with my 4G smartphone -- he doesn't have a smartphone yet -- and I got a speed of 12 download, and went out to the park near him -- same speed. But looking at his tower location, there is a massive electrical substation located between him and the tower, about 6 blocks from him, and I wonder if that is it. I don't know what his 5G speeds are but we'll just wait until one of his friends gets a 5G phone and can test for him, before he tries the T mobile home internet.

Your pattern of getting a better signal at night, as bad as it is, is the same as nearly everyone. If you haven't done it yet, you might also try doing a factory reset, using the hole located above the two yellow LAN ports on the gateway. Stick the end of a paper clip or something in there for 4 seconds. Then you're going to have to start over with the app.

I admit that I consider myself to be terribly lucky, to be 5 miles from a tower, and that this tower has n41 instead of n71. But it was also predictable. My 4G speed on the T mobile smartphone was between 10 and 60 (with the high speeds at night only), and then with the 5G on the same tower, I expected to get 2x the speed and got 3x the speed instead.

But if you give up and turn it back in, which I probably would do in your situation, try to keep in contact with neighbors or something via a message board and find out what provider is getting the best 5G service in your area, because it may not be there now, but it most likely will be coming soon.

And remember if there is a store near you, you can turn the gateway back in to the store and not have to mail it back in, if that is more convenient.

Lastly, the traffic of cell phone use and streaming videos, video chat, downloading things and other things during the day is what gives most people faster speeds late at night or in the early morning hours when people aren’t doing those things.

And as I said before, ping is what is really killing you. Even if you were getting speeds of 300, a ping of 800 would cause so much lag, halting, well, that would be a problem.

But who knows, maybe with a tower in a different location from Verizon instead of T mobile, and this could work for you.