Forum Discussion
5G Home Internet nightly slow down
Hey all, I’ve had the black 5G gateway for a couple days now, and have been a T-Mobile customer for just as long. I guess the issue I’m having is looking like one that a lot of other people are as well.
During the day my gateway pulls about 500 Mbps and has a “Very Good” signal. Without moving or changing anything about the setup, usage area, or anything, around 8PM Eastern my speeds go down to MAX 5 Mbps.
Nothing has changed other than the time of the day. I have a ticket open for the “local engineering department” to troubleshoot. It’ll randomly be good during the night and then go back to the unusable 5 Mbps.
I relayed this to Customer Care, and while they seem sympathetic to the plight, they ultimately just want me to continuously restart the gateway so they can reconnect it to the tower because it has “stopped communicating.” Is this the common reply that everyone is getting? Restart on restart while waiting for engineers to troubleshoot your wifi, only to then get told you need to restart to be reconnected to the tower, and then ultimately a factory default when they’ve exhausted their checklist?
New T-Mobile Home internet customer that has just replaced my ATT 4G equivalent due to T-Mobile’s unlimited 5G cap for the same price. I am 3 miles from my closest tower but have my 5G antenna on a 60’ tower pointed at the T-Mobile tower. I’m out in the boonies when I’m using this setup. I get 4 out of 5 bars but I’m getting only 6 MB down and 20MB up. I don’t really need blazing fast speeds for my applications. The upload speed is fine for me but the down speed is terrible. I am waiting on a new WaveForm 4x4 MIMO antenna to place at 60’ to see if that will help but I was positive that I should get better than this even while only using ANT1 (or ANT3) of the 4 antenna ports on my white T-Mobile hotspot box (G4AR?). I’m even using LMR400 (not RG58) coax due to the terrible signal attenuation of RG58 at 6GHz.
I see some folks complaining about ONLY getting 100MB down… Heck, I’d LOVE to see 100MB down. I may have to go back to ATT 4G and live with the 100GB cap if I can’t get this figured out. I’d also love to catch the same tech that ChefZiggy mentioned in his post.
wings1212 wrote:
I was hoping to get some good solutions, but find everyone is having this same issue with the Gateway! While our signal as always read “Weak” it was fine early a.m. and day--but come 6 pm. and the slowness and literally stopage begins. Don’t even get me started on the football games!! I feel like “you get what you pay for” with this. I have spent countless hours moving this thing around---I think my first clue was when our address did not even show on the T Mobile finder. Talking to friends I take the phone off Wi-fi as cellular does not break up. Each time I call T Mobile I get the reply “plug, unplug”-right. However I finally reached a rep who told me they would be getting new towers---when I asked when she said 4th Qtr 2024!!!! Why the heck is T Mobile selling these knowing they have overloaded the area--this is why the low price. Looking at Verizon’s new tower online I got the message they are not offering in this area until they have adequate coverage. We will be returning the tower this weekend. When I see how many are affected and how long this has been going on it really tells me who TMobile is. NOT customer oriented that is for sure.
So I finally got a tech that knew what they were doing, once she force pushed the firmware update it started working again, haven't had the nightly issue since it got pushed and installed, going on about a week now..
I was hoping to get some good solutions, but find everyone is having this same issue with the Gateway! While our signal as always read “Weak” it was fine early a.m. and day--but come 6 pm. and the slowness and literally stopage begins. Don’t even get me started on the football games!! I feel like “you get what you pay for” with this. I have spent countless hours moving this thing around---I think my first clue was when our address did not even show on the T Mobile finder. Talking to friends I take the phone off Wi-fi as cellular does not break up. Each time I call T Mobile I get the reply “plug, unplug”-right. However I finally reached a rep who told me they would be getting new towers---when I asked when she said 4th Qtr 2024!!!! Why the heck is T Mobile selling these knowing they have overloaded the area--this is why the low price. Looking at Verizon’s new tower online I got the message they are not offering in this area until they have adequate coverage. We will be returning the tower this weekend. When I see how many are affected and how long this has been going on it really tells me who TMobile is. NOT customer oriented that is for sure.
This happens daily more so now that my neighbor also has the home internet customer service told me the only suggestion is to go to a different provider because they dont have plans on fixing the tower issues its not “priority “ its got to the point where internet is not usable.
Found this thread while trying to figure out why my internet speed drops from 400 Mbps to 100 Mbps during late night/early morning times. While I enjoy the guaranteed-for-life price, I’m starting to regret the inconsistency with the service. I agree with amacc83 in that I believe T-Mobile is only trying to oversell the network without care for the quality. I’ll gladly switch to another network when available.
The CEOs policy is to oversell the network and degrade the quality for all to boost subscriber counts. I hope his shareholders start to discover that his business strategy is unsustainable and will cause massive turnover to Verizon and AT&T as their more stable networks continue to expand. The gaslighting tech support alone makes me have zero loyalty to T-Mobile. Unfortunately, options are limited where I am at so I have to endure until a proper ISP comes along.
I have the same slow down almost nightly at 9:00 PM-
Curiously when the internet drops my modem and APP both say I still have a good internet connection-
Same deal restarting daily sometimes twice-
T-Mobil tech says that my problem is due to saturation of the tower-and I may have to live with this until they upgrade-
I also told the tech that my other option would be to switch to a different provider-he wasn’t too fond of that idea-
I've read all these stories that share the same issue as I'm having and am wondering if I should even bother contacting support or if I'll just waste my time and they won't do anything to fix it.
New T-Mobile customer here with the same issues, but also in the morning.
This is not an isolated issue. If you are reading this, this is the norm. No sense in me writing down the issues, since you can just scroll up and read.
j-mobile wrote:
Two tips:
- I have found that placing my gateway AWAY from windows and directly next to a wall closest to the tower gets a best signal. I was placing it by a window for months before I figured this out. To avoid interference, I also try to keep the gateway clear of any electrical wiring that may be inside the wall.
- It is written in the “fine print” that network throttling down happens….(mine occurs every weeknight.) Here are the details: https://www.t-mobile.com/responsibility/consumer-info/policies/internet-service
Those shouldn't effect me at all..
1. I don't have it near a window, the tower is less than a mile from me
2. The plan I'm on prevents me from my data getting throttled (which is also listed in the link you provided)
Also, if it's the beginning of your billing cycle, your data usage has restarted so you shouldn't even get throttled if you aren't in specific plans. And with it only happening nightly, every night, there is an issue, special when it's only the home internet it's happening to and not my cell phones that aren't using the home internet (I alot of data on my phone, probably comparable to what I use on my home internet, but only that gets slowed down and not my phone
