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drd799
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T-Mobile Home Internet throttling speeds to certain servers (10x reduction)
My T-Mobile Home Internet service (unlimited plan) has been working great for the past 18 months. Download speeds consistently in the 175-450 mbps range (usually 250-350) when running speedtest.net using Ethernet connection to my gateway. 2 weeks ago my download speed suddenly dropped to 15-30 mbps consistently (speedtest.net) - a 10x reduction. Strangely enough my upload speed remained good at 25-50 mbps consistently. There's a long story about many calls into Home Internet and Customer Care support numbers, bottom line is that everyone kept telling me it's a cellular problem (connection between tower and my gateway) probably caused by shifting antenna positions on the tower due to the maintenance. This never made any sense because why would my upload speed not be affected if the cellular connection was bad? Making even less sense: All the metrics on my gateway look very good: 4 bars displayed on front panel, 5G RSRQ of -11, 5G RSRP of -72, 5G SINR of 40, 5G band N41. Today I discovered the real problem. Using speedtest.net one can select different test servers. It turns out speedtest.net has been automatically selecting servers that produce the very slow download speed results. Manually selecting other servers, I found some servers always give good download speed results, other servers always give bad download speed results. This is entirely repeatable and consistent. So is it a problem with those specific test servers speedtest.net uses? It turns out no. My next test was to enable a VPN connection using NordVPN to one of their VPN servers in a different USA city. I went back and ran speedtest.net to all of the slow servers, all of them were back up to good/fast download speeds when tested through the VPN. In fact all of the available servers in speedtest.net now reported good/fast download speeds (when tested through the VPN). Conclusion: It really seems like T-Mobile Home Internet is artificially throttling connection speeds to certain servers. There is obviously nothing wrong with my Gateway nor my cellular connection to the tower because through the VPN I can always get good download speeds from all of the test servers. 100% repeatable and consistent results. Sadly none of their technical group personnel seem to know this - they always check their coverage map and say I'm in a bad spot and the problem must be a bad cellular connection (despite the good metrics reported by my gateway). T-Mobile advertises that their unlimited Home Internet service does not throttle other than for tower congestion, which is entirely reasonable. However my testing shows that they are throttling for other reasons. I've communicated this additional information to the support ticket I've had open for the past couple of weeks, will be interesting to see if they will do anything with it.4.8KViews9likes8ComentariosRe: Is anyone else having problems with a changing IP address?
Just took some additional data on the problem, very interesting… When I disconnect my PC from my home network (internet provided by T-Mobile Home Internet) and instead connect it to my T-Mobile 5G mobile phone's hotspot - the same rapid IP address changes occur (in my dynamic Public IP address). However I also have a T-Mobile 4G LTE mobile hotspot. When I connect my PC to it, the IP address does not change - it remains stable (at least for the several minutes I tested...). So this problem seems related to devices connected to T-Mobile's 5G service. One more piece of data - I verified that when connected to the internet through my VPN service (using T-Mobile Home Internet), my public IP address is stable - also the VPN service doesn't seem bothered by the rapidly changing IP addresses in the T-Mobile system.3Visto1like0ComentariosRe: Is anyone else having problems with a changing IP address?
I'm experiencing the same very-rapid (once per second or so) changing IP address problem. Unable to log in to a variety of websites (cloud backup provider, webmail at my domain hosting service, drivers license renewal on my state government website, ...). I could log in to these earlier this year so the problem appears to have started recently for me. I actually made a screen-capture video demonstrating my rapidly changing public IP address, anyone can check it out here: Demonstration of Rapidly Changing Public IP address As others have mentioned, T-Mobile Home Internet call-in support hasn't been of much help, but I did speak to a supervisor who understands why this is a problem. I have a support ticket in to their engineering group (no opportunity to speak with them) and he said he will point them to this demo video and keep me updated with status of the ticket. I'll post any useful info I receive here.7Visto1like0ComentariosRapid changes in my Dynamic IP Address
Recently the dynamic public IP address assigned to me by T-Mobile Home Internet service started behaving differently. The IP address (reported by google when doing a google search for "what is my ip address") changes very rapidly, about once per second, sometimes even faster. This is very strange. All the dynamic IP addresses I've had assigned in the past by other internet service providers (cable, dsl, etc.) did change over time, but the changes were only once or twice per day, not once per second. The problem with the rapid changes is that some websites detect IP address changes and consider this a security risk. For example if I'm trying to log in to a website, I will enter my username and then enter my password, but when I click "login" button the website will take me immediately back to a blank login page. Or when I try to log in to webmail at my domain hosting provider it will post an error message saying "your IP address has changed..." and won't let me log in. Again, some websites are sensitive to the rapid IP address changes, others are not. I did not experience these problems when I first started using T-Mobile Home Internet service (early part of this year) on the specific websites that are currently having problems, so the rapidly changing public/dynamic IP address seems to be a recent issue. Since my public dynamic IP address is assigned by the T-Mobile system, that's where the problem exists. It is not a problem with my computers, home network, etc. I made a screen capture video showing the rapidly changing IP addresses - I hope the T-mobile engineers (I have a support ticket submitted) can view this video to help understand what's going on. Anyone can view the video, here's the link: Demonstration of Rapidly Changing Public IP Address