I've been using the home internet service since the beginning of March. It had been working really well, with me getting speeds between 25-100 mbps, which I've been super happy with since I'm in a rural area and it's hard to find internet that works here. However, since the beginning of June, my speeds have been around very inconsistent, but around 1mbps more often than not. Previously when my speeds were that slow, a simple restart would fix it. But I have rebooted/restarted the device many, many times, as well as tried doing a factory reset a couple times. Sometimes these things help..for a short period of time. Most of the time they don't change anything. Sometimes, after rebooting/restarting, my speeds will go back to 10-25 mbps for anywhere from a minute to a few days, but will then revert back to around 1 mbps. I've also moved the device around my house to see if I got a better signal elsewhere, which also did not help. I thought my device was overheating, so I've been using a fan to cool it, which hasn't seemed to change anything either. I contacted T-Mobile support when I first started having issues, but they just sent me the gateway troubleshooting guide with everything I have already tried, so I don't have a lot of faith in them being able to help me if I contact them again. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or know of anything else I can try? I'm just getting frustrated at this point, but don't have a lot of internet options where I live so I want to make this work if I can. Thanks in advance.

erin wrote: I've been using the home internet service since the beginning of March. It had been working really well, with me getting speeds between 25-100 mbps, which I've been super happy with since I'm in a rural area and it's hard to find internet that works here. However, since the beginning of June, my speeds have been around very inconsistent, but around 1mbps more often than not. Previously when my speeds were that slow, a simple restart would fix it. But I have rebooted/restarted the device many, many times, as well as tried doing a factory reset a couple times. Sometimes these things help..for a short period of time. Most of the time they don't change anything. Sometimes, after rebooting/restarting, my speeds will go back to 10-25 mbps for anywhere from a minute to a few days, but will then revert back to around 1 mbps. I've also moved the device around my house to see if I got a better signal elsewhere, which also did not help. I thought my device was overheating, so I've been using a fan to cool it, which hasn't seemed to change anything either. I contacted T-Mobile support when I first started having issues, but they just sent me the gateway troubleshooting guide with everything I have already tried, so I don't have a lot of faith in them being able to help me if I contact them again. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or know of anything else I can try? I'm just getting frustrated at this point, but don't have a lot of internet options where I live so I want to make this work if I can. Thanks in advance. Above, I'm linking to a video from YouTube where a T mobile home internet user named Nate (his YouTube channel is "Nater Tater") explains things about gateway location and how number of bars is not always related to best speed or connecting to the right band or band combination (2 bands for 5G) that will give you the best speeds.Instead, it is about finding a location for the gateway that gives you the highest speeds on speed tests. In other words, let's say you get only 2 bars. All 2 bar locations aren't alike. You don't say whether you were doing speed tests at each location you tried.Nate explains how finding your tower location, and locating the gateway, perhaps in a window, closest to a that tower, can help you get the fastest and most stable connection for you. And then even fine tuning your gateway location, by rotating it, can improve the RSRP or SINR (or SNR). RSRP is a finer indication of signal strength the the more rough "number of bars." He explains how higher figures are better on both of these, so an RSRP of -95 is better than an RSRP of -98, and with the SINR, which is signal to noise ratio, a 15 is better than an 11.I'm in a rural area also, and at home, my 4G phone can alternate connecting between two towers, one which is 5 miles away and one which is 10 miles away. Fortunately, I don't get this on my 5G home internet gateway. It connects to the closer tower only, and that has the desirable n41 mid-frequency 5G band, which gives me good download speeds of between 35 and 170, with no lagging problems.To answer your question, what could have happened, that you were getting such consistently good speeds for a few months, and now in June you're getting terrible speeds. Well, I can only guess, from the things I've read. If you have a 5G phone with a T mobile service, or have a friend who does and can do a speed test from your house, you can at least eliminate something going bad with your gateway. I know these 5G phones are still scarce. Still, if the speed on a T-mobile connected 5G phone is good from your house, then you know you need to replace the gateway.T mobile and other companies can make equipment changes to a tower, and also do "tuning," which could conceivably change your speed or signal, either way, for the better or the worse.By "tuning," that means making some adjustments, perhaps lowering or raising the transmission power, or adjusting the backhaul, which is equipment that is between the wireless tower equipment and their substation fiber connection to the internet.Suddenly, they make some change, and the signal you're getting, in the few degrees of coverage to your location, is worse. Maybe it helped others, but yours is worse.As happened to Nate, sometimes a company will be working on on a tower and then shift everyone to a neighboring tower for a while. But you would expect this is the type of thing they could have told you when you called up to tell them you got this bad speed drop in June. But maybe they give this kind of boiler plate steps to go through first to people. They'll do that before they file a repair ticket, which I believe is something they do to more seriously check that your tower is functioning properly.The GUI Nate speaks about, which is where you can find whether you're getting a full non-standalone paired connection of a Primary and Secondary, and what bands you are on, is at:192.168.12.1Just stick that in the URL box of any page, and click on Overview on the left, and later, Status on the left, and the dropdown arrows to find the information. If you're getting only a 1Mbps connection, they usually tend to go along with terrible connection period, so you might have to wait until you have some speed to even bring up the 192.168.12.1Knowing and understanding all this stuff probably won't help you get a faster speed, but it will help when you call T mobile, if you can tell them. "Hey, I'm connecting to a Primary signal only and not getting a 5G paired connection of Primary AND Secondary, what is up with that?"Some people with a really slow connection do get a 5G pairing, but the GUI will allow you to see what it is, example B66/n71 or B66/n41.I've read of instances where they install new equipment, and it takes them a week or more to ramp up the power, or tune it properly. They don't always use full power at first because they are monitoring for possible signal conflicts with other towers.City people have it easier when it comes to some of these problems, because they have more customers who are affected by a problem at the T mobile tower, and calling up to alert them to the same problem. In rural areas, you might be one of the only ones in your area that even has this service.On the lack of information end, partly because 5G is so new, and companies are installing new equipment at a rapid pace, if you go back through older threads of other people who had speed drops like yours, few to none ever get a resolution, or they don't get back to the board and tell how they resolved it.

I have had periods when the T-Mobile/Nokia 5G gateway connection runs slower & this past month have experienced repeated, random, frequent tower signal drops. I have repeatedly made trouble calls with T-Mobile support and provided lots of information. The conversations finally did come around to work being done on the tower where upgrades were being made. For me I went through the GW relocation process to try to improve the signal. I found a site waveform.com which is a vendor that sells external MIMO antennas that are compatible with the Nokia 5G router/gateway. The information was interesting & helpful to me to improve my connections to the tower. I discovered that the internal design of the router has the antennas in a vertical orientation all the way around the router. Think of it as an 8 sided device. There are multiple "5G" and WIFI radios. What I found most interesting was the rotation of the gateway in order to improve signal. From my extensive testing with rotation of the device I found the best 5G or LTE signal wash over the can from the tower is a little tricky to work out. It appears to me the antenna to the left of the back of the device is the 5G antenna & the one to the right of the back of the router is the 4G LTE antenna. I have not confirmed this 100% but if I direct the back of the can northward to the tower line of sight 5 miles away the signal strength of the 5G and LTE are a little reduced. If I rotate the back of the can to allow the 5G signal to improve a bar then the LTE signal usually drops a bar. Well, my preference is to favor the 5G as latency is lower and speed capability is higher. Keep in mind as you read the dBm values for the tower signals that they are negative values and lower is better than higher. Signal strength is NOT the only value to understand. The signal quality is also important. If the signal quality is good or excellent as well as a strong signal then this will help improve the traffic to/through the gateway. The values for RSRP, signal strength, and RSRQ signal quality can help you "tune" in the signals once you understand them. The SNR or SINR, signal to noise db value is good to understand as well as it is listed as a positive value vs a negative value. Anything in the 10-12.5 is good and above 12.5 is excellent. If you have a strong signal but it has poor quality well this is not a good equation. I did a great deal of research and reading to be able to work through this. You can search online and find information to read that explains all this in detail. The end result I came to is that if you are on the outer limit of the tower signal but still have a fairly strong signal with good quality then an external MIMO antenna can make the difference to really improve the communication. The external MIMO antennas run ~$200 and waveform.com has a guide that very clearly explains how to add an external antenna to the gateway. It is a good option for people on the edge in a rural area like I am in. With the T-Mobile push to roll out 5G they have been working on the towers & equipment so even with an external antenna maintenance work on the towers can still cause, and do, cause disruptions. The web interface to manage the device is, in my opinion, a bit flakey at best. With a direct CAT6 cable connected to the device on LAN1 or LAN2 that is the best solution but I still see it a bit flakey and the advanced features listed on the documents are just not there. I have the software version 1.2003.03.0178 in operation on the gateway & there are still limited options and no parental controls or QOS or MAC address handling etc… It is just a very dumbed down interface that is not mature yet or T-Mobile is not actually interested in providing the features yet as they have their hands full with the bigger roll out picture. For me it is the only internet solution I have here. My tower connections ran stable and rock solid, for the most part from January-June and then in July it went flakey at random intervals. Now T-Mobile has improved the tower, it appears, and it is back to stable. Don't just give up as there are ways to have improved signal and communication if you are persistent.

I would add when rotating the gateway to improve the signal exposure to the 5G or 4G LTE radios be patient and take your time. Expect to make a slight change, watch for improvement, then make another, and watch again. Don't expect immediate results. Tap the LED panel on the top, review the number of bars and repeat the process. Go all the way around if you want or need to. The more you play with it the more you learn how it works. Being connected to the web interface from the ethernet connection is good as what the LED panel reports is NOT as much detail as the web interface information. When you see the negative dBm RSRP, signal strength values, read as lower numerical values you will know you are improving the signal connection with the tower. > -80 dBm RSRP is excellent / >= -10 RSRQ is excellent / >=20 dB SINR is excellent. Watch the values rotate the gateway, record your results. ¡Buena suerte!

There are various ways to find the T-Mobile towers. The best confirmation I had was asking direct the coordinates for the tower from the support engineer on a call. I can see the tower, which I suspected was the one, and the T-Mobile support engineer was nice enough to verify that. It is important to know where the tower is, and more local router/gateway information to really isolate where the problem is. There are a number of variables to consider so if you have more than one client and a phone that is 5G as well then testing and figuring out why things are slow can be made easier with more points of reference. The router software interface shows you values but does not allow you much in the way of testing tools to verify with. From a couple of clients on the local LAN ping a couple of DNS servers, like 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 (google, quad9, cloud flare) and read latency. Using speedtest.net is helpful as well but if the signal goes up and down a bit the latency record from PINGs to DNS servers are a good reference.

Just make sure if you are by a window that your screen is not metal as that will cut the signal in half easy. If you have fiberglass screens no issue if you are unsure remove and test.

Slow Home Internet | Comunidad de T-Mobile

Timsw
LTE Learner
Hace 4 años
erin wrote:

I've been using the home internet service since the beginning of March. It had been working really well, with me getting speeds between 25-100 mbps, which I've been super happy with since I'm in a rural area and it's hard to find internet that works here. However, since the beginning of June, my speeds have been around very inconsistent, but around 1mbps more often than not. Previously when my speeds were that slow, a simple restart would fix it. But I have rebooted/restarted the device many, many times, as well as tried doing a factory reset a couple times. Sometimes these things help..for a short period of time. Most of the time they don't change anything. Sometimes, after rebooting/restarting, my speeds will go back to 10-25 mbps for anywhere from a minute to a few days, but will then revert back to around 1 mbps. I've also moved the device around my house to see if I got a better signal elsewhere, which also did not help. I thought my device was overheating, so I've been using a fan to cool it, which hasn't seemed to change anything either. I contacted T-Mobile support when I first started having issues, but they just sent me the gateway troubleshooting guide with everything I have already tried, so I don't have a lot of faith in them being able to help me if I contact them again. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or know of anything else I can try? I'm just getting frustrated at this point, but don't have a lot of internet options where I live so I want to make this work if I can. Thanks in advance.

Above, I’m linking to a video from YouTube where a T mobile home internet user named Nate (his YouTube channel is “Nater Tater”) explains things about gateway location and how number of bars is not always related to best speed or connecting to the right band or band combination (2 bands for 5G) that will give you the best speeds.
Instead, it is about finding a location for the gateway that gives you the highest speeds on speed tests. In other words, let's say you get only 2 bars. All 2 bar locations aren't alike. You don't say whether you were doing speed tests at each location you tried.
Nate explains how finding your tower location, and locating the gateway, perhaps in a window, closest to a that tower, can help you get the fastest and most stable connection for you. And then even fine tuning your gateway location, by rotating it, can improve the RSRP or SINR (or SNR). RSRP is a finer indication of signal strength the the more rough "number of bars."
He explains how higher figures are better on both of these, so an RSRP of -95 is better than an RSRP of -98, and with the SINR, which is signal to noise ratio, a 15 is better than an 11.
I'm in a rural area also, and at home, my 4G phone can alternate connecting between two towers, one which is 5 miles away and one which is 10 miles away. Fortunately, I don't get this on my 5G home internet gateway. It connects to the closer tower only, and that has the desirable n41 mid-frequency 5G band, which gives me good download speeds of between 35 and 170, with no lagging problems.
To answer your question, what could have happened, that you were getting such consistently good speeds for a few months, and now in June you're getting terrible speeds. Well, I can only guess, from the things I've read. If you have a 5G phone with a T mobile service, or have a friend who does and can do a speed test from your house, you can at least eliminate something going bad with your gateway. I know these 5G phones are still scarce. Still, if the speed on a T-mobile connected 5G phone is good from your house, then you know you need to replace the gateway.
T mobile and other companies can make equipment changes to a tower, and also do “tuning,” which could conceivably change your speed or signal, either way, for the better or the worse.
By "tuning," that means making some adjustments, perhaps lowering or raising the transmission power, or adjusting the backhaul, which is equipment that is between the wireless tower equipment and their substation fiber connection to the internet.Suddenly, they make some change, and the signal you're getting, in the few degrees of coverage to your location, is worse. Maybe it helped others, but yours is worse.
As happened to Nate, sometimes a company will be working on on a tower and then shift everyone to a neighboring tower for a while. But you would expect this is the type of thing they could have told you when you called up to tell them you got this bad speed drop in June. But maybe they give this kind of boiler plate steps to go through first to people. They'll do that before they file a repair ticket, which I believe is something they do to more seriously check that your tower is functioning properly.
The GUI Nate speaks about, which is where you can find whether you’re getting a full non-standalone paired connection of a Primary and Secondary, and what bands you are on, is at:
192.168.12.1
Just stick that in the URL box of any page, and click on Overview on the left, and later, Status on the left, and the dropdown arrows to find the information. If you're getting only a 1Mbps connection, they usually tend to go along with terrible connection period, so you might have to wait until you have some speed to even bring up the 192.168.12.1
Knowing and understanding all this stuff probably won't help you get a faster speed, but it will help when you call T mobile, if you can tell them. "Hey, I'm connecting to a Primary signal only and not getting a 5G paired connection of Primary AND Secondary, what is up with that?"
Some people with a really slow connection do get a 5G pairing, but the GUI will allow you to see what it is, example B66/n71 or B66/n41.
I've read of instances where they install new equipment, and it takes them a week or more to ramp up the power, or tune it properly. They don't always use full power at first because they are monitoring for possible signal conflicts with other towers.
City people have it easier when it comes to some of these problems, because they have more customers who are affected by a problem at the T mobile tower, and calling up to alert them to the same problem. In rural areas, you might be one of the only ones in your area that even has this service.
On the lack of information end, partly because 5G is so new, and companies are installing new equipment at a rapid pace, if you go back through older threads of other people who had speed drops like yours, few to none ever get a resolution, or they don’t get back to the board and tell how they resolved it.
iTinkeralot
Bandwidth Buff
Hace 4 años
I have had periods when the T-Mobile/Nokia 5G gateway connection runs slower & this past month have experienced repeated, random, frequent tower signal drops. I have repeatedly made trouble calls with T-Mobile support and provided lots of information. The conversations finally did come around to work being done on the tower where upgrades were being made. For me I went through the GW relocation process to try to improve the signal. I found a site waveform.com which is a vendor that sells external MIMO antennas that are compatible with the Nokia 5G router/gateway. The information was interesting & helpful to me to improve my connections to the tower. I discovered that the internal design of the router has the antennas in a vertical orientation all the way around the router. Think of it as an 8 sided device. There are multiple "5G" and WIFI radios. What I found most interesting was the rotation of the gateway in order to improve signal. From my extensive testing with rotation of the device I found the best 5G or LTE signal wash over the can from the tower is a little tricky to work out. It appears to me the antenna to the left of the back of the device is the 5G antenna & the one to the right of the back of the router is the 4G LTE antenna. I have not confirmed this 100% but if I direct the back of the can northward to the tower line of sight 5 miles away the signal strength of the 5G and LTE are a little reduced. If I rotate the back of the can to allow the 5G signal to improve a bar then the LTE signal usually drops a bar. Well, my preference is to favor the 5G as latency is lower and speed capability is higher. Keep in mind as you read the dBm values for the tower signals that they are negative values and lower is better than higher. Signal strength is NOT the only value to understand. The signal quality is also important. If the signal quality is good or excellent as well as a strong signal then this will help improve the traffic to/through the gateway. The values for RSRP, signal strength, and RSRQ signal quality can help you "tune" in the signals once you understand them. The SNR or SINR, signal to noise db value is good to understand as well as it is listed as a positive value vs a negative value. Anything in the 10-12.5 is good and above 12.5 is excellent. If you have a strong signal but it has poor quality well this is not a good equation. I did a great deal of research and reading to be able to work through this. You can search online and find information to read that explains all this in detail. The end result I came to is that if you are on the outer limit of the tower signal but still have a fairly strong signal with good quality then an external MIMO antenna can make the difference to really improve the communication. The external MIMO antennas run ~$200 and waveform.com has a guide that very clearly explains how to add an external antenna to the gateway. It is a good option for people on the edge in a rural area like I am in. With the T-Mobile push to roll out 5G they have been working on the towers & equipment so even with an external antenna maintenance work on the towers can still cause, and do, cause disruptions. The web interface to manage the device is, in my opinion, a bit flakey at best. With a direct CAT6 cable connected to the device on LAN1 or LAN2 that is the best solution but I still see it a bit flakey and the advanced features listed on the documents are just not there. I have the software version
1.2003.03.0178 in operation on the gateway & there are still limited options and no parental controls or QOS or MAC address handling etc… It is just a very dumbed down interface that is not mature yet or T-Mobile is not actually interested in providing the features yet as they have their hands full with the bigger roll out picture. For me it is the only internet solution I have here. My tower connections ran stable and rock solid, for the most part from January-June and then in July it went flakey at random intervals. Now T-Mobile has improved the tower, it appears, and it is back to stable. Don't just give up as there are ways to have improved signal and communication if you are persistent.
iTinkeralot
Bandwidth Buff
Hace 4 años
I would add when rotating the gateway to improve the signal exposure to the 5G or 4G LTE radios be patient and take your time. Expect to make a slight change, watch for improvement, then make another, and watch again. Don't expect immediate results. Tap the LED panel on the top, review the number of bars and repeat the process. Go all the way around if you want or need to. The more you play with it the more you learn how it works. Being connected to the web interface from the ethernet connection is good as what the LED panel reports is NOT as much detail as the web interface information. When you see the negative dBm RSRP, signal strength values, read as lower numerical values you will know you are improving the signal connection with the tower. > -80 dBm RSRP is excellent / >= -10 RSRQ is excellent / >=20 dB SINR is excellent. Watch the values rotate the gateway, record your results. ¡Buena suerte!
iTinkeralot
Bandwidth Buff
Hace 4 años
There are various ways to find the T-Mobile towers. The best confirmation I had was asking direct the coordinates for the tower from the support engineer on a call. I can see the tower, which I suspected was the one, and the T-Mobile support engineer was nice enough to verify that. It is important to know where the tower is, and more local router/gateway information to really isolate where the problem is. There are a number of variables to consider so if you have more than one client and a phone that is 5G as well then testing and figuring out why things are slow can be made easier with more points of reference. The router software interface shows you values but does not allow you much in the way of testing tools to verify with. From a couple of clients on the local LAN ping a couple of DNS servers, like 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1 (google, quad9, cloud flare) and read latency. Using speedtest.net is helpful as well but if the signal goes up and down a bit the latency record from PINGs to DNS servers are a good reference.
007BondMI6
Bandwidth Buddy
Hace 4 años
Just make sure if you are by a window that your screen is not metal as that will cut the signal in half easy. If you have fiberglass screens no issue if you are unsure remove and test.
iTinkeralot
Bandwidth Buff
Hace 4 años
Sure, the metal screen would work just like a Faraday cage and knock out the signal. The screens on our windows are fiberglass so not an issue. Actually the router is sitting in a larger window the size of a 36" door with no screen at all so the signal comes through pretty well. Being 5.3 miles from the tower is not optimal but given it is line of sight and no obstructions is a significant bonus. I wish T-Mobile would actually build in a few trouble shooting tools in the HTML interface and improve it. With the current software the lack of advanced feature controls in the web software on a client PC/laptop is a distinct disadvantage. Third party tools are available but it would be helpful for T-Mobile support and customers to have a built in tool in the HTML software that runs some basic scripts to collect important statistics that would empower the support engineers with a collection of data that gives them answers they need about operation. It would improve customer satisfaction and help out T-Mobile support.
PerryJ
Network Novice
Hace 4 años
Having exactly same problem with slow home internet. If it doesn't get fixed soon may have to go back to cable which I really don't want to do as I left them for a reason. Tm home internet Started out at about 100 to 200 mbps. Now it's about 20-30mbps and videos buffer all the time. My phones still get good speeds, the 5g phone gets 300-400mbps on speed test but my 5g home internet is only 20-30mbps. If management is throttling home internet to only 20-30 mbps then I'll have to leave b/c cable is 200+mbps or greater consistently. Was expecting to get similar service on home internet as I do on my phone but it isn't happening. Spending a lot of money with t mobile and expect high speeds on ALL devices all the time. Especially the home internet, which should be highest priority on their network as we use it for work, meetings, school etc...
Timsw
LTE Learner
Hace 4 años
PerryJ wrote:

Tm home internet Started out at about 100 to 200 mbps. Now it's about 20-30mbps and videos buffer all the time. My phones still get good speeds, the 5g phone gets 300-400mbps on speed test but my 5g home internet is only 20-30mbps. If management is throttling home internet to only 20-30 mbps then I'll have to leave b/c cable is 200+mbps or greater consistently.

Assuming your 5G phone is on T mobile also, this is a rare problem and reason to believe maybe something went wrong with your gateway. If I were you, I'd call in to T mobile, ask for a call back, and see what they have to say could be causing this.
Istrico
Newbie Caller
Hace 4 años
Having the exact same problem since June as well. My 5g phone and mifi hotspot are getting much better speeds, so this thread leads me to believe it's my gateway. I've called repeatedly and t-mobile has basically just said they don't know why it was ever good as they don't really cover my area. I wish I had an alternative in my area, but we sadly don't.
Toolman
Network Novice
Hace 4 años
I'm also experiencing slower speeds and connection dropouts. My original issue gateway failed about a month ago. It had been in service since April. My primary and secondary signals are on B66/n71. The original issued gateway was giving me, on average, a RSRP of -106 dBm primary and -95 dBm secondary and speeds upwards of 60+ Mbps down, 30 Mbps up. I received an exchange gateway 4 days after talking with a T-Mo tech. This replacement seems to be defective. I'm still on the same tower and bands. The RSRP on the primary is the same, but the signal in the secondary (5G) is weak, -112 dBm. I've gone through all the setup steps and ended up in the same location with the can turned 90° clockwise from the original setup. Signal quality and snr are very good on the primary, and marginal on the secondary. My speeds have dropped significantly. I'm now experiencing signal disconnects that I didn't have before. I'm also in a rural area, 2.5 miles to the tower, trees obstructing line of sight.