Forum Discussion
Speed Drops the regains and restart ?
I have had the T-Mobile trash can for about a year and my speeds have always been kind of slow like 30 -60 down and 7-9 up, now that’s fine for me but noticed this past week the speeds have changed ....
T-Mobile does not have any baked in log of the gateway functions as far as I know. Since they have destroyed the use of ICMP using the ping utility and/or trace route is not an option.
One thing you can do, that might be helpful, is to check your external IPv4 and IPv6 address information by going to the site, https://whatismyipaddress.com and checking before and after the change in behavior. Does it still show your location in the same city? I checked mine and it shows up in Nashville though I am in eastern TN 200+ miles away. If the location changes that might be a bit of a clue. Maybe it does not change where the traffic surfaces. Just looking for things to check and see what may change.
It could be something related to traffic handling in the local tower equipment. If that is the case the reboot might be the only workaround for now. I don't know quite what it might be other than a buffering issue.
One thing you could do if you are somewhat technical is run a Wireshark packet capture and examine the traffic flows. You can simplify it by using the Analyze option > Expert Information. This will pop a window with a listing of packets and you can see what is going on. If you run a capture before when things are going good and then after the change it might present a bit different profile in the traffic handling. If there is a significant increase in retransmissions and "warnings" that might be helpful to know.
I ran a packet capture for maybe 15 seconds and could see a couple of things I did not expect but one DNS thing was related to my iPhone so that seems to be a bit one off. I don't see an indication of traffic problems currently and my download is excellent today even at noon. Ever since they changed our signal source from n71 to n41 I have been keeping an eye on things. It was super stable on the n71 so when the transition to n41 took place it made me a bit anxious as I have seen those conversations in the community about how the n41 cells are stood up and at first they are great and then choked down to pretty much near useless. I suspect there is some overloading in some urban markets where expansion is planned but not implemented broad enough so too many users are on the cells leading to congestion and excessive throttling. Given your speeds either you are on the edge of the cell or the signals are just not as good as one would like. Without knowing the cellular metrics it is impossible to know.
