tmobile home internet speed issues

I had the same issue. I ordered the service after being guaranteed I was surrounded by towers that were going to give me amazing service. When I called the first time in June I was told 2 bars on the gateway was so great and was talked into waiting for the massive improvement coming in July. If 2 bars is great, why are there 6 bars on the gateway? Well July came and I called again, I was told my gateway was bad, they were sending me the "brand new" gateway that would fix everything. When it came, it was used and all the wires/booklets were missing. After sitting on the phone for 4 hours, I finally cancelled the service. That was over a week ago and I'm currently on hold AGAIN to find out where the return labels are because I refuse to pay for these "high speed" gateways. I paid for 3 months of non existent internet. I understand people in cities are having excellent connections, but us folks out in the rural areas are clearly looking for a solution to not having options and T-Mobile fell flat.

I’m in Phoenix, right next to a 5G tower, but on opposite side, in a concrete and steel hotel.

I’m getting 50Mbps pretty consistently, which is better than hotel WiFi.

Trying to bump up speeds.

 - Does screenshot below with only Primary Signal mean I’m not getting full 5G?

 - Where do I look to find the bands, mentioned below, being used (B12 vs N41, etc)?

I looked around the Web GUI,and iOS app, but didn't see it.  

 - Is there another network utility app I need to use?

Also - Is there a way to bring down Pings?  - I’m getting 300 mS times.

I tried setting DNS on my devices to 1.1.1.1, Cloudfare, but it seems like that needs to be done on gateway.

 - Any way to set custom besides external router?

 - Any other low hanging fruit?

Maybe I am getting 5G?

MickeyDAZ wrote:

Maybe I am getting 5G?

 

Mickey, if you're not showing a signal on the Secondary -- you said that in the previous post that you aren't -- then you are on 4G LTE. The 5G signal current technology is a non-standalone 4G/5G pair, whereas 4G LTE stands alone on one 4G signal band, prefaced with a "B". The 5G shows on the secondary signal prefaced with an "n" as is usually either n41 (mid-frequency) or n71 (low-frequency).

It’s a shame you’re so close to the 5G tower though, and not getting faster speeds, but you’re right in thinking it can have something to do with the wall composition of the building you’re in. The gateway works best in a window facing the tower, usually.

So you're sure this 5G tower is a Tmobile tower? There is a vlogger on YouTube from Phoenix, "Tech Extremist" who travels around testing all the towers in Phoenix, including T mobile.Drop him a line in the comments in one of his videos about Tmobile home internet. He knows the equipment on all these towers and might have an idea of why you're getting such speeds, or unable to pick up the 5G signal from where you are.

Another thing that can account for a slower speed or not getting a 5G signal is that the density of different providers in a big city and the frequencies they use limits the degrees in a direction to which they broadcast. It's called a sector. They don't broadcast 360 degrees. They direct it out in a limited sector, to avoid signal conflicts. So you may be on the opposite side of where the antennas are directed.

Thanks for advice and tips.

It's a 5G tower. I used a 3rd party cell tower lookup site to verify. No glass view to it though as it's on opposite side of billing from my room.

Ended up chatting w TNO and found out it's undergoing maintenance until Monday. TMO is going to contact me after to check w speeds. They agreed I should be getting more than 20Mbps. 

I also realized after that my iPhone and Cellular iPad DL speeds were also diminished, compared to earlier. I had been getting 250 Mbps (5G) until Thursday when tower must have had hardware issue. 
 

so their story holds water for now. 
 

Murphy’s law timing I guess. 

Seriously guys, I don't know what many of you are complaining about.  We live in a semi-rural area and the best we get first thing in the morning is about 15-20 mbps down and usually less than 1 mbps up.   When we first got this about 4 months ago, we could stream live sports with no buffering, no issues whatsoever.  It freaking rocked!!!!  However, that was short-lived as now it just crawls.  I have rebooted, unplugged, cleared messages, done the technical support stuff, and its still slow.  We have ZERO secondary signal.  When I first got this, I was so hopeful because of my dislike of ATT but it is worse.  The only benefit of the T-Mobile is there is no data cap like with the AT&T version (150gb).  However, the T-Mobile speed makes it unusable except for general browsing only and that's about it.  For comparison purposes, we have ATT version as well, and we get 35-40 mbps down and 20-25mbps up.  I know its not great but thats the non-satellite options we have in our area. 

Trandel_Elent wrote:

I am out in Phoenix, Az. I’ve had these speeds since I started my service.

I'm in Laveen, AZ.  My ISP is a random ISP, Phoenix Internet, and we get about 5 mbps down and not even 1 up.  I saw this gateway ad on Tmobile and reached out to a Tmobile sales rep and was told I'd get no less than 180 down and 34 up.  I plugged in the gateway and got 160 up the first day, since then I'm only getting no more than 2 mbps up.  I'm really losing faith in this gateway and was told by a TMO rep that I have a 14 day buyers remorse.  Probably not going to keep this.

magenta10423868 wrote:

I've had this service for ~ 6 weeks and have had very good speeds, averaging around 200 mbps down, 60-70 up. In the last two days it's been 8-12 down, 3-5 up, and is now unusable. I was planning on recommending this to my neighbors, as we are all forced to use a very expensive cable alternative in my town. I am rethinking this now. If it keeps up like this, I'll have to fall back to cable. It's certainly not what they promised me.

Same for me. Hate to go back to xfinity but T-Mobile isn’t delivering what they promised

When I first got this back in May of 2021 My speeds were at 200Mbps and I told all my friends and bragged about how fast this went.  Then near the end of the year they did some "Changes" and now my fastest speed is about 20Mbps and that is on a good day.  Man this thing is sooooooo slow.

They had me reset my gateway and then send me a new one and still the slowest. I think they must have either saturated my area or redirected the antennna on the tower as it doesn't get hardly any speed even with 3 bars.

I keep telling myself I'm saving $20.00 a month. Speeds are horrible, sites take forever to load or timeout and don't load at all and Roku often freezes and takes 10-20 seconds to catch up. Barely acceptable for the casual use in my home, wouldn't work for someone actually doing something. It's new and T-Mobile doesn't seem to have the infrastructure to deal with the demand, maybe they will do something about it. Hey, it's $20.00 cheaper per month than anyone else here.