t-monile home internet is barely providing basic data speeds sometimds.

After reading this thread it seems to me that this is all because of tower switchover and nothing to do but waiting until it's completed. Now if someone wants to explain to me when you do try to change settings on the gateway's website it asks for username and password, what would that be? Thanks for any help.

If you’ve tried T-MOBILE support and have gotten nowhere…..

Understand first and foremost, if your signal is low, your 5G service will be poor. We engineer types call this "garbage in gets you garbage out."

Now regarding the T-MOBILE internet equipment on the towers, it operates on what T-MOBILE calls 5G-UC, which is basically a "mid-band" frequency that carries a lot of bandwidth but is not as fast as "high band." But frankly, for home internet mid-band is all you need. I have learned in my area that the tower equipment for HOME INTERNET is not the same as is used for mobile phone service, and that T-MOBILE does not over-subscribe the service. This means if you get good signal, you'll get great performance.

After signal improvements I commonly get greater than the rated bandwidth for the service except during peak TV viewing time (when everyone is streaming). During peak times, I get near 90% of the rated bandwidth of 115Mbps down and 23Mbps up. This is tremendously better than the local yo-yo ISP provider in my area.

The simple solution is to get a 5G cell signal booster, is good for metro and suburban applications, but not good for rural applications. Here is a company that sells several, but you may be able to get one from T-Mobile customer service for free, see https://www.surecall.com/signal-booster/cat/home-office/?GA_network=s&GA_device=c&GA_campaign=359540784&GA_adgroup=1316116102395667&GA_target=&GA_placement=&GA_creative=&GA_extension=8177657646064&GA_keyword=surecall%20flare&GA_loc_physical_ms=73538&GA_landingpage=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.surecall.com%2Fsignal-booster%2Fcat%2Fhome-office%2F&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=359540784&utm_keyword=surecall%20flare&msclkid=63d026ddde731514e44d44d7383784ef&utm_term=surecall%20flare&utm_content=Surecall%20Flare

For rural users, it gets more difficult, read on:

I live on lakefront property and had similar issues with both T-Mobile internet and digital TV reception issues. The root cause is simple; signal interference from a line of trees. Signal would get worse during spring and summer, and would improve during colder months, likely due to less tree leaves "attenuating," aka reducing the signal quality. The solution was two fold: an antenna mast that I mounted to the back of my home that helped me realize 30 feet elevation, and 2: an outdoor antenna system for the T-Mobile device / high gain antenna for my Tivo DTV receiver. The antenna mast is heavy duty and designed for rural applications. The antenna mast was purchased from Amazon, see https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Up-Telescoping-Mast-TM-50-U-95/dp/B010GAQ3K4/ref=sxin_15_ac_d_rm?ac_md=3-2-YW50ZW5uYSB0b3dlcg%3D%3D-ac_d_rm_rm_rm&crid=1ZRVF69Y6MB43&cv_ct_cx=antenna+mast&keywords=antenna+mast&pd_rd_i=B010GAQ3K4&pd_rd_r=2f058b48-bce3-4b8a-84cd-f75aeef0bcd5&pd_rd_w=wAMTe&pd_rd_wg=L1ZHs&pf_rd_p=5fdda09e-d732-41f0-8362-9e3e115c3771&pf_rd_r=TF9FQV9FBB671GTZX44A&psc=1&qid=1644881211&sprefix=antenna+ma%2Caps%2C270&sr=1-3-12d4272d-8adb-4121-8624-135149aa9081, the antenna system for the T-Mobile device, see https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway/ , and instructions from

Mind you, this is a technical video. Get someone technical to help you if it is beyond your skills. For DTV, I purchased this monster antenna and mounted it to the same antenna mast  3 feet above the 5G antenna, see : https://www.amazon.com/pingbingding-Antenna-Outdoor-Amplified-Mounting/dp/B07DGYGGSF/ref=sr_1_15?keywords=150+mile+range+tv+antenna&qid=1644881882&sr=8-15 .

In closing, I hope I have brought to this discussion some information to help those in need.

-Hank

Same here only diff I've had for 6months never had  over 4to5 mb but I was told b4 I joined we'd get 300mb tech on phone says it's at 75 somethings not right for last month if the signal on its own goes from 2bars to 1 then none I have to every 5min move it like a centimeter to grab atleast 2 bars but again and again it keeps dropping now it only says the router isn't using the 2.4ghz as it's main now just the 5ghz an 2.4 does show up I've tried every window every inch of my house we moved out to country so we go from fios and 500mg to the only internet we could get was crappy 500k dial up from century link till t-mobile should I ask for the square 5g router? I just ordered netgear wifi boost an extender my info only shows LTE

RSSI.         -75

BAND.      20M

CID.          7

CGI.             31026015235073

RSRQ.      -20

BAND.         B66

TAC.        31612

danf wrote:

@hank has some good stuff about boosting your signal, but my router reports very good signal and it worked great for the first few weeks...  now pretty much unusable.  have they pushed out a bad firmware update or something????

are things working better this morning for anyone else?  literally did not change the position of the router.

almost like someone came into the office and gave the servers a kick or something…. 🤔

I think I have a good outcome. Hope everyone else gets same from T-Mobile.

I was having same issues as many have voiced here.

Had service with good performance for about 8 mos and all of the sudden download speeds were garbage.

first call to support was 2 days ago. Frustrated with the rep reading from a script of hollow pleasantries. Had a slight bump in download speeds and hoped it would continue, but it did not.

called again today and was firm and direct - but respectful - in my communications with the rep, providing evidence from speedtest.net results that something in T-mobiles network admin and settings was affecting my service.

Rep said he would do some stuff, communicate with engineering and get back to me. He called back about three hours later and said they are still working on it and would be back in touch with me in the next 2-3 days.

as of this evening, i am getting the best network performance I've ever experienced at my house in northeast GA. Three speedtest.net results at 5pm, 8pm and 10pm have all been between 160-180mbps down and >53mbps up. And unless something very recently has changed, I'm in an LTE coverage area, not 5G.

I hope this improvement is stable and permanent, but as of right now very satisfied.

Joshjafackl wrote:

My t-mobile internet, especially lately, has been the worst internet I have ever bought/dealt with. My wife with her iPhone 12 Pro gets medium 5g coverage most of the time at our house. Why does our home internet modem averages weak to poor signal? I've never gotten a better signal than weak. It is also CONSTANTLY losing connection to the internet witch is hard on my wife when she works from home full time and is constantly dropping connection to her work. I'm never getting the minimum download speed I was told I would at least be getting and streaming and or gaming is virtually impossible. Please help or I'm going to have to cancel and go back to our previous internet provider. 

I've been dealing with download speeds of 1mbps to 3mbps since April 2022. before that we had 130mbps on download speeds for at least 2 years. Then they say there working on towers. The tower that we had good download speeds with was 6 miles away. Now they are tagging off At&T tower which is a half mile from us. Almost a year later and they still do not have it fixed. One day we had thought they fixed the problem, back up to 130mbps download. that lasted for a few hours. I have over 100 hours logged with tech support. SMH

T-Mobile’s home Internet service sucks, as does its fake 5G service (really just relabeled 4G LTE).

There's really not much point in checking radio frequency bands, connection strength, and so on. The proof is in the pudding: on weekends and late at night, I get download speeds in the hundreds of Mbps. During business hours, 1-2 Mbps!

My suggestion is to return your gateway and choose a different provider. It's a shame that so many people are wasting time troubleshooting a service that is nothing more than a false promise. The network capacity just isn't there.

Another thought would be to buy a 5G or even 4G LTE modem (Netgear has a range of them, including battery-powered portable ones that are much smaller, more modern and offer better network performance than the generic gateway T-Mobile provides) and get a data-only SIM card. T-Mobile's prepaid arm offers 50 GB for $50/month, not a lot but adequate for someone who doesn't play online games, doesn't stream TV shows all day, and just has basic Internet needs. (There was apparently a limited-time 100 GB for $50/month promotion, and those who have it can keep that rate. Let's hope it comes back, or that prices fall and data caps rise with the market.)

If you go this route you are sure to get better speeds, not only due to the more capable hardware, but also because T-Mobile Home Internet has close to the lowest priority on the network.

For people who like to tinker (and since we, as users of a service as immature as T-Mobile Home Internet, have to spend so much time checking frequency bands and signal strength, moving the gateway, rebooting, calling support, etc., most of us are tinkerers by definition), I’d even recommend getting a 4G LTE (cheap) or 5G board from SixFab and using a Raspberry Pi. You’d end up with a very high-performance, secure, infinitely configurable cellular modem + WiFi router setup.

I'm seeing similar issues,  I get 200mbps for a while then it drops to 3-4 mbps, power cycling the modem (Arcadian) sometime get's it back to 200.  It has got to the point where I have a smart plug on the modem so I can power cycle it from my phone.  I'm almost ready to start scripting the power cycle when the speed drops :-)

Here is a graph of the last 24hrs (speed test every 30 mins on both my primary T-Mobile Home Internet and backup AT&T Wireless Internet connections - policy based routing on pfSense to direct the speed test traffic)

I thought it might be falling back to 4g but bands are B2/N41 consistently with 4 bars each, the cell ID doesn't change, SINR, RSRQ and RSSI are stable and don't change when the speed drops.  Pixel and iPhone both get consistently good speeds with manual tests when wifi is disabled and they are on the cell directly).

All test on gigabit ethernet (not wifi) from a linux VM on ProxMox server running speedtest-cli.

TMHI tech did some sort of remote reset / re-provision and it hasn't helped.  They have me scheduled for a call back in a week and if it hasn't improved they want to swap out the modem.

[I’m software / network engineer, I work from home and my setup has a *lot* of monitoring]