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

I tried to post to this thread earlier but it was sent to moderation and never showed.

I’m on B66/n41 no matter where I place the router with B66 getting 3 bars at best and n41 getting two.

I get ~225Mbps at best although there has been some brief instability in my first week with speeds temporarily dropping. My old internet was so awful that it's still 10-20 times faster with TMobile. I ordered the external antenna and will see what that does for me. 

My TMobile/Nokia (cylinder) gateway is sitting high up at the top of a cabinet on the north west of my house. I don't use the wireless that comes with the gateway since I have a better one in use already. I hooked the cylinder up to my LAN via Cat-6. I had to switch everything else to the 192.168.12.x subnet which was annoying but had no problems beyond that.

I tried seeing if I could move the router and get switched to the n41 band but all I got was a really slow B66 connection. There's probably just one tower I can really reach.

In my particular location I have mountains to the East and a valley to the West. I assume that really fake looking tree down the street is the tower 🙂 Local "geographic features" prevented me from using other wireless services. I tried signing up and was told it wouldn't work so was really happy when the 5G router worked. I wish I had known sooner as the older LTE router probably would have been an improvement over my old DSL. I can't get good digital TV signals here for many stations btw.

Line of sight actually goes down towards the tower so it has trees and houses and whatnot in the way so I'm good with 3 bars if that's all I ever get. It's still better than the 10Mbps DSL phone lines I had for the previous 10+ years.