Slow Home Internet

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.