T-Mobile Home Internet Download and Upload speed difference

@DemDemD it has generally been my experience that the upload/download speeds vary most during the time of day - fastest between 8pm and 6am with fewest traffic on the local freeway. Moving the gateway in my experience has not provided the experience you are asking about. That said, I suppose it's not impossible. 

@copz1998 I understand the speed varies.  Dependent on time of the day and the location.  E.g.  I actually have faster speed at the south of my house vs the north side.--Even when both have excellent signal.  I'm just curious if there is a correlation of upload vs download speed where upload speed would prefer a different location than download speed.

I recall it being mentioned, although not sure if it's true or not, that download speed corresponds with the quality of the secondary 5G signal and upload speed corresponds with the primary LTE signal. Moving the gateway around can improve one signal while diminishing the other which could explain your issue.

I ended up choosing the location that provided the best 5G signal even though the LTE signal quality is slightly reduced. In my case, even though the towers for both signals are in the same place, they seem to be directed at different angles.

You can check the quality of the two signals using the T-Mobile Home Internet App. Select the "MORE" tab and click on "Advanced Cellular Metrics". There's multiple discussions on this forum that discuss what the readings mean.

@Darko66 All of those "Advanced Cellular Metrics" are showing "Excellent" value for my location.  I was testing the speed at three different locations in the home before I followed the T-Mobile app suggestion of the best location.  The location it provided was also one of the three that I was testing and saw the best download speed.  I wasn't particularly interested in the upload speed at the time of testing.  However, I did notice that it went upload speed between 6 - 100mbps.  I can't remember which location where the upload speed was the best.  It's just now that I've done all the tidying at the final location and don't want to have to take the setup apart to test again.  The upload speed has been constant 5mbps though.  I would prefer it to be at least 10mbps.

Pure speculation, but I suppose it's also possible that when you move the gateway to the other side of your home, it's connecting to a different LTE tower. And, even if your signal is excellent in both areas, one tower has less congestion, so performs better. It's also possible that one tower operates on a higher speed band than the other, but not sure if that would account for upload speeds as low as yours.

More than likely, based on the excellent quality of your signal, but still poor speed, the problem is too much traffic on the LTE tower you're connecting to in the gateway's current location. If that's the case you will need to reach out to T-Mobile support to see if they have a solution for you. I'm not sure if they have a way to force the gateway to connect to a different tower or to at least ignore a troublesome one.

Since you already have a good signal, I'm not sure if it will make a difference, but if you haven't already, you can try rotating the gateway to see if it improves things. Maybe start off rotating in 45° increments and then fine tune in smaller increments. In my case even shifting the gateway left and right makes a slight difference in finding the best angle to the towers.

The N41 band, especially when dealing with the router transmitter "upload" side of things does not have the range of the N71 band.  So, if you are reasonably far away from the tower, you may find that if you are on the N41 band, you may be getting really fast downloads, but not so great uploads.  The N71 band may actually be quite a bit faster than the N41 band for uploads in that case.  As an example, I am 5.5 miles from my tower (but I do have line-of-sight to it), and the N41 uploads never get much faster than 40-50 mbps, even though I can see 500+ downloads.  The N71 band, however, routinely gets 60-75 mbps uploads, even though downloads almost never exceed 100 mbps.

I desperately would like to increase my upload speeds and decrease the down.  I currently have 65 down and 2-4mbs up.  I've read your articles, but it's foreign to me.  How do I know if I'm on N71 or N41?

@mrdriz In the T-Mobile Internet app of your phone, go to More-->Advanced Cellular Metrics.  You should have the LTE and 5G tabs.  Each of the tab will list the metrics.  Click on each metric and it will give you more information.  Looks like you're having bad signal like 3 bars on your receiver.  I would use the app to find out the best location in your house to place it.  My friend has 20mbps down and 1mbps up with the 3 bars signal.--This is due to him living on the mountain side and there are many trees blocking the signal as well.

@DemDemD glad you were able to accomplish a successful resolution. I will note your resolution as it may help someone else down the road.

Thanks for sharing!