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TheloniusJ's avatar
TheloniusJ
Roaming Rookie
4 years ago

5G Home Internet Suddenly Very Unstable And Technical Support Is Essentially Useless

Wondering if anyone else is having similar issues.

First, at $50/month for 5G speeds with no data caps, this service is pretty much the best deal out there.  When it is working well, we typically see speeds in the 60+ Mbps down/ 20+ Mbps up which is by far the best performance we’ve ever had at our house.  

Unfortunately, it has recently become the case that it almost never “works well”.  Over the last couple of weeks, we are lucky if we can get an hour a day where it is getting this kind of performance.  For much of the day, it is actually not even usable (we’re talking less than 1 Mbps and barely registering uploads).

The strange thing is that when we first got this modem, it never seemed to be the case.  I saw some forum discussions that overheating might be an issue, but it really isn’t that hot.  Additionally, when it is performing poorly, I noticed that we are getting less than two bars primary and zero bars secondary on the modem.  Again, this previously wasn’t the case.

Sometime rebooting with temporarily resolve this issue, but I am not kidding when I tell you that most days we restart the modem a minimum of five times.  Many times it simply doesn’t fix anything.

Compounding this is the fact that TMobile seems committed to off-shoring their technical support and the quality of this service is so bad it could be a post in itself.  Over the last couple of months I’ve probably called once a week, which typically eats up an hour of my day and has rarely resolved anything.  On three occasions, the representative told me they would call me back and not one has.  Not one.

On the last call, I managed to get a “manager” on the line who honestly was not any better than those who work for him.  His only solution was to downgrade us to LTE even after I told him that we ultimately go the 5G device because the LTE was working very poorly.

Anyway, I’m 99% sure I’m just going to have to bail on this service and go with Starlink which is available in my area.  This really bums me out because when Tmobile’s service is even working halfway decent it is more than enough for us, but “half-way decent” at this point is a dream state for us.

Again, I’m curious if others are having similar issues.  For what it is worth, we have the Nokia 5G cylindrical tower.