Recently, Ive been getting only 2 bars

Just as a note on the ‘roaming’ … unless you’re in an area that T-Mobile actually allows roaming, you’ll end up on ‘Emergency Service Only’.  

You will know when you are roaming, as T-Mobile has a cap on data (200MB?)

I have roamed in Maine on US Cellular

Similarly, in California (SoCal / SLO Cal) if my device loses service for ~1 min, my phone will connect to AT&T / Verizon, and data + calls are disabled.

T-Mobile claims 4G LTE + 5G service in those areas, but none exists for miles.

Attempting to get T-Mobile to even acknowledge the issue is basically an act of congress.   

You can escalate through T-Mobile , but from experience, unless it is a ‘big’ traffic area, or has some external funding (gov’t or commercial push), you’ll probably not have much luck.

Nobody wants to see 2 bars for their cell signal. I hate having this problem too. I went to:

Settings > Cellular > Network Selection >

Uncheck “Automatic” and guess what? T-Mobile *AND* Verizon cellular networks are in the options… ummm, WHY?? when I chose T-Mobile as the default, my bars increased to full bars and then down to 3 instead of 2. I found this very strange. Data roaming is probably playing a role as well although I don’t know how much of a role. T-Mobile needs to sort it out and give us the strong signals we paid for when we signed up!

I have been having this issue for the last two months. My phone only ever shows 1 or 2 bars of service and most calls I make within my home are dropped or sound like I’m under water. If I’m lucky the call will hold up while I’m outside of the home. I have an iPhone XR, have updated to the latest iOS, tried connecting and disconnecting from wifi calling it doesn’t matter what I do. It’s becoming very frustrating and I can’t make a phone call to T-Mobile because it drops. A customer support email for T-Mobile to address problems like this would be helpful. 

It’s possible that you’re connecting on a different band.

From ‘1’ site, you can be connecting to the following bands - listed from ‘strongest to weakest’ as typically displayed on your device:

B71 LTE (600MHz)

B12 LTE (700MHz)

B2 LTE (1900MHz)

B4 LTE (1700/2100MHz)

B41 LTE (2500MHz)

Similarly on 5G …

n71 (600MHz)

n41 (2500MHz).

Eg.  At home, on n71, I’ll have 3 bars of signal, from a distant tower, and very slow service.  On n41, its 1 bar at best.  1 bar on n41 will give me ~50Mbps, 3 bars on n71 will give me 5 Mbps.

I live in Houston Texas and Sugarland Texas 

I have an iPhone 12

I am blocks away from Hwy 59, a major road. 
I have rarely gotten more than two bars, three sometimes, and four never. 
ive recently moved and have no internet, so I’m kind of screwed

what is going on?

I also am only getting 2 bars..received replacement unit today and same issue..very very slow speeds

Thank you so much turning off WiFi calling actually worked and made my bars go up from 2 to 4 plus it’s faster !

The appearance of bars can be rather deceiving because you can have several megabits per second speed difference within the same number of bars. The software controls how it reads the signal and displays the bars accordingly. You may recall several years ago with the Apple iPhone 4 that reception was reported to seem weak so Apple sent an update to the software that made it appear as if the signal had gained strength by increasing the threshold for the bars. in other words all the software did was give you an extra bar even if the signal had not increased.

It still stays at 2 bars even outside of my home. I do feel like the network is slightly faster despite that.