slow speed on home internet

Daipau123 wrote:

Thanks for your comment. I believe the tower is about 3 miles or so away. It's definitely more than a mile. Talked today to the customer service and they told me they're working on the tower to update it to 5G. Should take 3 days and he will call me back then to check if it's better. Will see…Any of you have been told the same thing, if so what was the outcome? We also ran a speed test, it was very, very low with 0.00 downloads! They also reported the test but they blamed it on the tower being update it.

I'm retired, and although I've been reading about 5G for less than a month, I've had a lot of time to read about it and watch videos. My reading has included reading and watching (on video) dozens of people getting started with this, and the problems they've had. I can assure you the "working on the tower" excuse is real. It should give you a sense of relief. Once it is turned on and working properly, it can be dramatic. Please write back and tell us what happens either way.

I've been a hobbyist with computers for 50 years, having learned programming in college when I was 17. I was an early home PC user and then owner, and on the Internet in 1992, the first year it was available to home users. I had a job for a year once helping people troubleshoot a broad range of their computer problems, but it had nothing to do with smartphones then. But I've never worked as a programmer or in IT really, but I've worked with software, written data bases, spread sheets, and dabbled in writing small programs in several computer languages I've learned throughout the years.

I have seen recent videos by some vloggers who are following the individual installations in their areas by the three major companies mostly, the new towers, the equipment upgrades to new towers, and things like mmWave nodes in cities, the latter which is something T mobile isn’t into as heavily as Verizon.

I'm sure the T mobile customer service people are given access to a database which shows the maintenance schedule of every tower in the system. They know what one(s) you're on, and they can look it up and see what is going on.

Sometimes equipment parts are delayed in manufacture, or for whatever reason they find maybe a band isn’t working well on a specific tower, or there’s a service interruption because an anti-5G conspiracy theorist shot at a tower and blew out some equipment causing a service disruption.

I can even guess what they might be doing, and that is installing their newer, better mid-band n41 5G, where an inferior model existed like the low band n71 which is slower but reaches very long distances. Or, there was only 4G to begin with.

If you were getting the 4 bars on 4G, even though it wasn't working or went out shortly thereafter, I think you should look forward to speeds of around 50 to 100Mbps, or possibly more. There's a good chance of it.

I have read posts by people here that say, "It's a lie, Tmobile has no 5G, and then they don't explain what they mean. Are they crazy? A little bit. But there is an element of truth in that the 5G signal relies on the 4G still, to carry it to the 5G. It is called "non stand-alone" 5G. That is the current state of 5G. They have a "seamless" integration, 4G and 5G, and I'm quoting T mobile on that.

Back in 2019, the president of Tmobile himself announced that the ultra capacity mid-band 5G, like n41, will double 4G speeds, and it has for a lot of people but not all of them. Some people are too far away, or there are too many obstacles in their way, even if they are within a mile of a tower.

The fastest download and upload speeds are from the high band millimeter wave (mmWave), and people within a block can sometimes receive speeds between 1000 and 4000Mbps with that. But it is in cities, because the range is so limited, to only about a mile. mmWave is problematic for other reasons as well, such as it doesn't pass through trees or walls very well. It can be blocked by  low-E windows.

One of the biggest advantages of 5G over 4G is the capacity, or number of customers it can reach for the amount of equipment used on a tower -- it reaches vastly more people.

Here is some excellent information about the bands and waves that Tmobile uses, which I copied from their own website:

5G

• Frecuencias que pueden proporcionar 5G: 

  • Band n71 (600 MHz)

  • Band n41 (2.5 GHz)

  • Band n260 (39 GHz)

  • Band n261 (28 GHz)

• Con 5G, se pueden transferir cantidades de datos elevadas con mayor eficiencia que con 4G LTE. 

• Una de las maneras en que T-Mobile está implementando 5G rápidamente es a través de la integración del espectro de banda media de 2.5 GHz de Sprint.

• Echa un vistazo a ¿Qué es 5G? ¡para aprender cómo funciona!

Alcance 4G LTE extendido

• Frecuencias que pueden proporcionar Alcance LTE extendido

  • Banda 12 (700 MHz)

  • Banda 71 (600 MHz)

• Nuestra señal de alcance LTE extendido llega 2 veces más lejos y atraviesa paredes para brindar cobertura 4 veces mejor bajo techo.

4G LTE

• Frecuencias que pueden proporcionar LTE:

  • Banda 2 (1900 MHz)

  • Banda 5 (850 MHz)

  • Banda 4 (1700/2100 MHz)

  • Banda 66 (Extension of band 4 on 1700/2100 MHz).

• 4G LTE ofrece velocidades de descarga rápidas, velocidades hasta 50% más rápidas que 3G. Consulta Velocidades de datos.

• Los servicios de voz y de datos solo funcionan al mismo tiempo si tienes activada la función VoLTE en tu dispositivo. De lo contrario, LTE solo proporciona datos.

This is back to me again. I'd like to say that I understand what it is like to expect something to work, and then it doesn't and be frustrated. And for people looking on the chart above and in a panic because they see their Primary signal is from Band 66 (4G LTE), they should know that that can still be 5G as long as a secondary signal is showing in the GUI (See my previous post about using the GUI.) That's the way 5G works now, with 4G on the primary and 5G on the secondary signal. You're on 4G alone, if you have only a primary signal with no secondary signal.

Although for me this has been a huge leap in speed, and truly wonderful in that I have to pinch myself, only time will tell if my service will be reliable, and work as well as it does now. However, this is kind of exciting for me, because living in the boonies, I've always lagged speed-wise by years compared to the closest city, and here I am in the first real year of the rollout of this 5G technology for home internet.

Unlike DSL, where the company NEVER upgraded my speed without paying for it, 5G customers have the very  real possibility of getting speed upgrades in a few years, as their equipment on the towers improves. All the major companies will have to do this to retain customers.

The endgame in speed with 5G is quite possibly speeds of 20Gbps for wireless, that is 20x the speed of the 1G of Google Fiber.