Forum Discussion
T-Mobile Home Internet is not ready for Primetime
I honestly can't wait until fiber is laid up our street as T-Mobile's home internet literally sucks. There's no way one can dependably stream video, and 4K video is out of the question. How they can honestly call this service 5g blows me away. We're now supplementing tmobile's home internet with DSL. We're getting a rock solid 56 Mb download speed with our DSL while tmobile's download speed is anywhere from 1-25 Mb. The only reason we're keeping tmobile is because the upload speeds are a consistent 60-75 Mb, and my wife occasionally needs to upload large graphics files. We've had the service for a year and I can't wait to drop it.
We have had Home Internet from TMobile for about a year. We were very happy with the service last year, till August, when suddenly the modem could no longer connect. After complaining to the support team, it took over a month before they shipped us a new replacement modem - which fixed the problem.
However, for the past month or two, our connectivity has been exceptionally flaky. We are lucky if the internet connection stays up for an hour or more. Speeds are never higher than about 30-50Mbps during the day, often much lower. However, during the wee hours of the morning I have seen speeds upto 90Mbps.
I called the support team yesterday, and apart from power cycling the modem, they couldn't offer any help, even though, the support engineer felt that the problem was resolved. The only advice he had was that he recommended that the modem needed to be power cycled once a week, to clear out cache. The support engineer was too talkative, and he really never even attempted to understand the real issue, and clearly had no clue. The problem persists, and does not show any sign of going away.
Maybe things are looking up. I just ran a Speedtest last night and the download speed was 400 Mb. This is by far the best speeds since I first signed up, previously never having better than 70 Mb, and for months on end speeds that were inconsistent and never above 30 Mb while having constant dropouts. Crossing my fingers that this will become the standard.
JoeFM wrote:
Maybe things are looking up. I just ran a Speedtest last night and the download speed was 400 Mb. This is by far the best speeds since I first signed up, previously never having better than 70 Mb, and for months on end speeds that were inconsistent and never above 30 Mb while having constant dropouts. Crossing my fingers that this will become the standard.
If you are getting a 400 Mb download you are probably connected to an n41 5G signal. From the sound of the behavior you experienced it is quite likely the T-Mobile engineers were in the deployment phase of the n41 band on the tower. With the push to provide services T-Mobile does seem to be pushing equipment deployments and upgrades pretty hard so sure some mistakes can be made or service disruptions due to improvements. If you are connected to an n41 signal source you will see some great speeds. You should confirm the location of the tower with the PCI, physical cell identifier value for the 5G NR signal. If you use cellmapper.net you can probably find the tower your GW connects to. If you have the Nokia it is easy to see the cellular information and identify the PCI value for the 4G and 5G signals.
In some locations the deployments may not be "ready for primetime" BUT T-Mobile is pushing hard to get the services out there. Where else can you get home internet for $50/month with no contract and no data cap and no additional fees? Once it IS stable it is a really good deal.
I just had mine for 4 days (Dec 2022) and here are the reasons it’s a NON-STARTER:
- Admin only via the mobile app. No admin access via the LAN ports to the unit on .1
- No bridge mode. You have to double-NAT in case you have your own gateway.
- No IPv6 support. It’s 2022 and the t-Mobile cell network supports it, why not this unit?
- No UPNP options.
- No Port forwarding.
This is NOT a proper gateway solution. It's amature hour with too many corners cut.
