T-mobile Home Internet Wifi Hub loses internet frequently, not reliable.

I have had the internet service for four months. A month ago, every other day i loose service i called they said restart the modem, it is frustrating, I asked for a manager, I was told that he is in a meeting, The next time that this happens again, i do not want to hear that they are new and that they are working on the towers, i will use deceptive comcast service. These companies only care about the CEOs and the investors. Customer service does not exist anymore.

I have been having exactly the same problem with the home Wi-Fi gateway. I have only been on T-Mobile for a few months. However I did cut the Comcast cable. I expect a stable Wi-Fi environment. I have done all of the troubleshooting requested by the experts including replacing the gateway and creating multiple SS IDs on the gateway. The problem still persists. I have also noticed that the technical support experts are no longer local they seem to be coming from OFF SHORE. Sometimes they are very difficult to understand. I am getting to the point where I am going to look for other Wi-Fi solutions . I am hoping that T-Mobile can actually address the problem which seems to be tower specific. I am in a position where I have two towers within a half a mile of the gateway. However they tell me that I keep connecting to one that is more than 5 miles away . When I ask why they say because the local towers are congested. I find it hard to believe that they are congested 24 hours a day seven days a week. I always have 3 or 4 bars - so the signal is strong!  T-Mobile needs to address this problem or they are going to lose customers and receive some bad press ! 

HomeWifi_User_Without_Internet wrote:

Hola,

I have had the T-mobile Home Wifi Hub for about a year now. (The gray Nokia cylinder)

I have spoke to tech department already and have been given a new hub replacement.
The problem with internet randomly cutting out has persisted with the new hub as well, and I am just about ready to cancel service.

I have 4 out of 5 bar connection to the tower with both the old and new hub. I can actually see the tower I am connected to just outside the window. Whenever my internet cuts out, I check the hub and it says it has strong connection to the tower.

My wifi connection to the hub is also strong, full bars, but no internet going through sometimes.

This issue affects every device in the house every day all at once. Even devices connected to the hub by wire experience the same issue at the same time as the wireless devices connected to the same hub begin to lose internet service.

 

T-mobile experts say there is nothing wrong with the tower or with the hub. I am starting to believe they simply don't know any better and their tools lack the details needed to troubleshoot this problem.

 

When it works, it works great, over 200 mbps on average.
 

I have also noticed odd issues where certain pages are heavily filtered. It used to be that Steam app friends page was not loading correctly but recently that problem is mostly resolved. Now when downloading a game on steam at full speed, it tends to take down the whole internet and I have to restart the hub to get it working again.

Seeing T-Mobile gradually improve their service is good news, but it's too slow of an improvement if I am still having issues after almost a year with the service. It's just not reliable at all.

I noticed reducing download speed to about 40mbps resolves the internet loss issue. But this is hardly a problem solved, rather a band aid to the issue.

Maybe T-mobile home wifi is not ready for home use yet. Internet needs to be reliable without interrupting itself many times per day.

Anybody here have any real working solutions ?

 

Bars mean nothing what matters is the signal quality.

Phone app is a bit limited go to 192.168.12.1 on your computer web browser.

First page expand Primary and secondary internet connection signal all that info is needed screen shot ok too.

Then on the left click Status and again expand Primary and secondary cellular network again all that data or screenshot.

Again need 

RSRP

SNR

RSRQ

RSSI

For both primary and secondary.

And Band for both.

With this info we can help you.

RSRP the lower the number the better.

SNR higher is better on this one.

RSRQ lower is better.

RSSI lower is better.

007BondMI6 wrote:

Bars mean nothing what matters is the signal quality.

Phone app is a bit limited go to 192.168.12.1 on your computer web browser.

First page expand Primary and secondary internet connection signal all that info is needed screen shot ok too.

Then on the left click Status and again expand Primary and secondary cellular network again all that data or screenshot.

Again need 

RSRP

SNR

RSRQ

RSSI

For both primary and secondary.

And Band for both.

With this info we can help you.

 

RSRP the lower the number the better.

SNR higher is better on this one.

RSRQ lower is better.

RSSI lower is better.

Hey, Thx for the help
I have attached 2 screen shots of the details, maybe this helps shed some light on the issues.

Here is a chart to pick the metrics apart. The n41 RSRP is weak. The RSRQ is good. and the SINR is Good but why is the RSRP so weak? Locate the tower 100% with cellmapper.net via the PCI value. You might be able to get a better location for the gateway to improve the signal received strength.

The 4G LTE signal is strong and clean. It looks like the n41 may be falling away or the 5G signal moves to another tower due to the weak signal from the n41. 

Sadly, none of this is info is available anymore via the web. 

So, in effect they offload some users to other towers where it is guaranteed the service will be diminished but other users on the close tower remain. It comes down to implementation. One might think that is a win for those that remain on the close tower but in actuality that is probably not the case. The implementation of QoS, quality of service, for those on the tower will undoubtedly lead to reduced bandwidth per user so the service experience will probably not be much better. It always comes down to the return on the investment and pushing to make more money with less expenditure. If not done in a balanced, fair manner it will go sour in the end. I am sure each area will have limitations for tower and cell deployment so they have to decide to deliver a quality experience for the customer or a compromised solution. It might all go like it has for Netflix for them. Users tend to abandon service providers that do not deliver on a quality experience. There is almost always going to be someone else happy and capable to provide the service. 

Here it is rural so limited resources and fortunately they decided to load the tower and, so far, have not overloaded it. It may be only the n71 frequency but it holds stable and the dips in bandwidth when user load picks up has not been a major issue. Our new neighbor could not get on with T-Mobile as all the load for users is determined to be maxed out. They went with Verizon as options here are very limited. The only other option is HughesNet and well I don't consider that much of an option. I hope you find an option that works out for you. If the solution is not stable and reliable users will go elsewhere. 

It is frustrating and it mostly happens on weeknights. If you look at the app on your phone you can see it  disconnect then reconnect. It is playing hell on my router. Symptoms to me is network management when the network gets busiest!

So keep an eye upon it and watch the PCI for before and after a disconnect. Does it disconnect and reconnect to the same cell or another cell? The PCI, physical cell identifier, will tell you if it is making a transition to another tower or not. Keeping a record of the cellular metrics is also a clue. If the RSRP, signal receive power, RSRQ, signal receive quality, and SINR, signal to noise ratio, all change a fair amount from before and after again that would be good to know. It could be when the tower is more loaded there is the usual QoS but the signal could become weaker and then the source lock would more likely transition over to another source. I don't know what threshold needs to be met for a horizontal handoff but there are multiple factors that could come into play to cause the gateway to have a handoff to a stronger source. It is cellular delivery where mobile handhelds are going to be migrating from one tower to the next and they probably get priority over the home internet gateways when the cell delivery is busy. The traffic and loading is probably much more problematic in urban areas vs rural locations. There are more mobile handsets making handoffs from location to location so the routing has to keep up and the QoS controls have to be dealing with the ever changing environment. There is probably a great deal of work that needs to be done for the cellular home internet solution to be fully mature.  Connection loss is a very frustrating problem. No argument here on that topic. If you decide to hang onto the T-Mobile solution looking carefully at the cellular metrics and discussing what you have learned with engineers at waveform.com might be helpful. Sure, Waveform is in the business of selling antenna solutions but they know how the cellular is supposed to work and how their antenna solutions can help improve signal reception. If you are serious about staying with the T-Mobile solution, or have no other options where you are, then an external antenna might make a big difference. Here I have only T-Mobile or possibly Verizon and HughesNet. My neighbor has the Verizon solution as no more room on the T-Mobile tower, and he said it was working great for them. 

WiFi steam not working