Slow Home Internet

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.