User Profile
tronguy123
Transmission Trainee
Joined 7 years ago
User Widgets
Contribuciones
Re: Phone not automatically connecting to 5g internet
Near as I can tell, memorized characteristics of the older Wi-Fi network, even with the same SSID, are getting in the way of connecting to the same named SSID on the new Gateway. Go figure. The second thing I figured out, eventually, was that the more elderly of the two wi-fi connected printers I was running was simply incompatible with the same named SSID. No amount of mucking with the printer settings worked. Found a hint on the web: The 5G Wi-Fi band signals, as generated by the 5G gateway, were not compatible with the 5G Wi-Fi on the printer. Some kind of backward compatibility problem. Solution was odd, but workable: Using the 5G Gateway App, created Yet Another SSID, a single character off from the main SSID I was using. Again in the App, rig it so that SSID is on the 2.5G Wi-Fi band, only. Give it a random but sane password and configure the Gateway. That worked: The printer connected to the 2.5G Wi-Fi sans problems and was able to print. One Last Thing. So, in this place, pre-T-Mobile-Gateway, I was running a Cable Modem; output of the cable modem was wired to the WAN port of a Netgear Nighthawk. That's a dual-band (5G/2.5G) Wi-Fi router with four Ethernet ports. Half the gear in the house ran from Wi-Fi; the other half was hard-wired to 1GbE Ethernet, RJ45 and all; and there was a small $15-dollar-special Access Point in the garage that provided some Wi-Fi coverage for some gear that needed it, hooked up to one of those Ethernet cables. First mistake: Removing the WAN cable from the Cable Modem and putting the Ethernet cable from the 5G Gateway in its place. Um. That Won't Work Well. Turns out that t-mobile is doing Carrier-Grade NAT; and the router wasalsodoing NAT, resulting in everything in the house having to go through two stages of NAT to get to the Greater Internet. If you look up this kind of configuration on the Interwebs, you get shifty looking eyeballs from the cognescenti. It's kind of.. well, itoughtto work. But there are reports out there that, well, "working" is a relative term. And I can report that I saw weird behavior. Solution: One can continue to use a router in this kind of configuration, but the best thing to do is to put the router in Access Point mode. When one does this, it turns off the router's NAT (which is OK, the T-Mobile Gateway will do the job) and the router's DHCP server.. which is also fine, the 5G Gateway will do the job there, too. Further, as I said above, that Gateway runs IPV6, natively: And, after the change-over, suddenly, everything in the house has a bunch of IPV6 addresses as well as some "backup" IPV4 addresses.. and everything starts working Much Better. You're welcome.1Ver0likes0ComentariosRe: Phone not automatically connecting to 5g internet
Um. So, I've had the T-Mobile 5G Gateway for just over two weeks now. And I've discovered stuff. First off: Regarding phones. Say that, before one got the 5G Gateway, one was running a router or something with a particular SSID. And said router would have been a decent router and all that, whether or not it comes with the cable connection is or something that one had bought before. Now, with said pre-existing router, one wouldprobablyhave been running with IPv4 (typically: 192.168.1.xxx addresses), with WPA/WPA2, or, possibly, WPA3. And it all would have been working. So, first things first: Remove the cable modem, put in our handy 5G Gateway, fire it up, and, lo and behold, it kinda works. Now, one thing the app does right off is suggest that one go ahead and set the SSID and wi-fi password. No surprise: When I got the instructions to do that, I hauled out the SSID I was using for the dozen or so widgets in the house that had pre-programmed in (printers, the Chrome TV dongle, the Roomba, the PCs, and the phones) and used that; and, naturally, used the same password as was being used for that pre-existing SSID. I had, shall we say,interestingproblems. And now I cut to the chase: The 56G Gateway is very definitely positively using IPV6. It does IPV4, too, but it's kind of a sideline. The 5G Gateway very definitely implements WPA3, as well as WPA and WPA2. The dumbInternet of Things (printers, Roombas, and the like) don't have a clue, or much of one, about IPV6 and certainly don't know about WPA3. The cell phones and PCs, which are being kept up to date by various and sundry updates, Got Confused. And either wouldn't connect, wouldn't stay connected, or, if connected and got turned off/turned back on again, wouldn't connect without having to put the wi-fi password back in again. There turned out to be an easy solution. On both PCs and cell phones, it is possible to see the networks that one has connected to at one time and that the device has memorized. On an iPhone (for example), it's Settings->Wi-Fi->Edit (top right corner), at which one is given a list of every wi-fi network one has connected to. On a Windows 11 PC, it's Settings->Network & Internet->Wi-Fi->Manage known networks, which comes up with a similar list. DELETE THE SSID FOR THE GATEWAY in the PC/cell phone/tablet. Then, go back and connect the PC/Cell/Tablet to the SSID, providing the password when prompted. Ta-Da! No more connection problems.2Visto0likes0ComentariosRe: Home internet modem keeps powering down and restarting
Um. I'm an electrical engineer. I troubleshoot hardware for a living, at least until recently when I retired. Brand new T-Mobile Gateway, the tall, square in cross-section one. Started seeing $RANDOM dropouts, once every couple of hours, as soon as the thing was put in use. On day, happened to be in the office upstairs where the thing was placed, down went the internet. Looked over, screen says, "Powering Up". There had been no power outages whatsoever. When it came back up, so did the internet. Four hours later, lather, rinse, repeat. Called T-Mobile support. After the usual five minute wait, talked to a nice service rep. Se said it was clearly a problem with the gateway. AND that that particular brand (the tall one) was known to have this problem. Drop shipped me a new one on a Friday, got it on this last Monday. Opened the box: Same rough shape (square in cross-section) but shorter than the original. Set it up. No more drop-outs. Did have to swap the SIM card from the intermittent one to the new one, but that was it, beyond the usual setup follies. Could be the power brick. But, speaking as a troubleshooter: I've seen hardware that does stuff like this. A fair number of reasons. Overtemperature on some device that causes excessive current draw; reset sensor whose voltage thresholds are too high/too low, so it causes a reset; bad parts in manufacturing that short out intermittently; and so on. I note that it took a while before it started doing this in my case, at least four or five hours. Most factories power up their equipment, sometimes in a heat tent, with the intent of detecting early failures. So this looks like a factory escapee: Should have been caught during testing, but worked long enough to ship. There's this general idea: One can do a lot of testing when one builds a product. Testing the circuit board, lot testing individual components, testing the assembled board before putting it in the box, testing the complete box after assembly (functional test), and, of course, heat tank testing. If one is getting 99%+ yields at a particular test step and there's decent fault coverage, it's often cost-effective to skip some tests and use others. This works if one's suppliers provide low-fault batches of hardware; one pays more for that, but then gets to skip hiring people and mounting test stations, so it's an interesting balance for the manufacturing engineer. But there are pointy-haired bosses who just love skipping testing steps in the interests of low costs.. and this smells of that.12Visto1like0ComentariosRe: TMobile Money is not available Quicken Users...
Basically, I wouldn't mind giving T-Mobile my banking business. Except that the lack of Quicken integration, of any kind, is a show-stopper. Period. Quicken has, basically, three ways of operating: Simplest: Download .csv files or similar (there's an interchange format) that allows dumping transactions into the register. Bit more complex: There's a Web-Connect that does the same thing, but it can be initiated by the user, so that multiple accounts at multiple financial institutions can get transactions downloaded. Direct Connect: Highly secure, Quicken's servers talk to the financial institution's servers. Faster than web-connect. As an added bonus, those banks that pay for the privilege can also pay bills this way, avoiding the ad-laden, cookie-laden, privacy-stealing method of paying for bills directly on a financial institution's own web site. Thing is: It's not just banks that do this. So do major mutual funds, brokerage houses, and other financial institutions. Heck, the 401K plan at work has Quicken integration! T-Mobile's banking attempt, as currently constituted, high interest rates or no, show that they're running a tricycle in a Indy 500 race car world. Catch up, T-Mobile! Dig out that spokes lady of yours that used to run around on her motorcycle!4Visto5likes0ComentariosRe: Trade in our phones or carry a separate FM Radio?
The Samsung S8 actually has an FM radio. But there are Issues. First, there is this app, NextRadio, that, on a radio-enabled phone, could let one tune the radio, select favorites, and so on. Problem: the developers couldn't make money on it, so the streaming and an ability to search for a radio station by name or type evaporated. It's abandonware these days, but one can still get it on the Play Store. Second: FM is real, live radio, with a wavelength in 3 meter range. There's a reason that even cheapie FM radios come With a whip or, like in the S8 case, use the headphone cables as an antenna. A modern cell phone like an iPhone with no audio jack, well, it's not going to cut it. Contrary to popular rumor, many current phones don't have the FM chip. That rumor about chips being generally disabled got started when particular carriers, with Verizon as the poster child for this behavior, would disable the FM chip in their firmware loads so they could force their customers to use more streaming data, before the advent of common unlimited plans. Thing is, T-Mobile was, and probably still is, one of the good guys in this regard, and has always generally enabled the FM chip if a phone has one.4Visto0likes0Comentarios