Forum Discussion
Repeated 5G Gateway Failures
I have been a new T Mobile 5G internet customer for the last two months. I have the KVD21 modem/gateway. For the first six weeks, I couldn’t have been happier. With a signal level of three bars (best signal location for my house) I consistently had download speeds in the neighborhood of 100 mps, with a ping response of 70ms and good s/n ratios and jitter. However, two weeks ago my modem/gateway appeared to have died, suffering from repeated line drops to the gateway and download speeds of 1mps (or less). Power cycling and gateway resets at first seemed to provide recovery only to start loosing connection to the internet, and sometimes not even keeping a 5G connection to the tower (modem/gateway would show zero bars and no LTE or 5G connection). This would happen only a few minutes after a power cycle and/or reset.
Customer support quickly sent me a new KVD21. After swapping SIM cards with my old unit, the new gateway would not set-up correctly, changing only the Wi-Fi and administrator passwords, but not the network name from the T Mobile default. It also would not stay connected to the tower more than about ten minutes, and never passed a speed test (no connection or download speed of 1mps or less).
I am now on my second replacement KVD21. Like its predecessor, setup would only change the Wi-Fi and administrator passwords, something that customer support was apparently aware of on other units. Connection speeds were great; over 100mps download. My wife and I streamed two 4K shows last night (several hours after my initial setup of the replacement KVD21), but this morning there is no joy. Download speeds of 1mps or less and dropped tower connection after about ten minutes. This is incredibly frustrating. I want this to work, as for six weeks it did.
Has anyone else had any experience like this?
- Jeffro0105Network Novice
I've been having just about the same problem. When I had the first gateway it worked pretty well for the first several months. Then had to reboot it almost every day. So I went to the local Tmobile store and they gave me a newer gateway. And then the problems continued. Gateway says I have 4 bars on the connection. And it keeps dropping the connection. Alot of the times I'm not even getting 1mgbs of download speed. I've been on the phone with customer service several times now. Same results the run diagnostics test do this do that. Nothing has helped. The customer service is about useless. Paying for a service that barely even works now. Seriously thinking about switching providers. This is just ridiculous.
- JeannetterizziNewbie Caller
I have also face the same problem, and that is really annoying. I am a parent and when the internet doesn’t work my children starts annoying me. I am happy when they are busy in their phones gaming and other such thing, I don’t like when someone disturbs me again and again to check the internet. Kindly solve the issue.
- Solidone410Newbie Caller
Same here!!! It worked perfect for about 3 months and now my streaming buffers constantly... It is very annoying!
- bingleRoaming Rookie
Same exact problem here, T-Mobile are you listening?
- bingleRoaming Rookie
I will at times have speeds of 200 mps then. Next thing I know it’s buffering and speed test barely runs and shows 3.0 mps.
- BigJonRoaming Rookie
Update: I decided to stick with my second Arcadyan gateway/modem and see if I could return to where I was happy with the service and get consistently high download speeds.
After a series of power cycling and resetting the gateway to factory defaults, I started getting more consistent service but download speeds never returned to the high 100+mps that I was seeing during the first 6 weeks of my T Mobile 5G Internet service. Looking back at my download speed history, there was a clear change after August 1, 2022. Since that time my highest download speed has been 30mps with the average download speed of 18mps, barely double the speed of my old DSL service but without the consistent reliability of my DSL service. Also, I’ve seen two or three drop offs each day where ping times suddenly jumped to 100-800ms and download speeds of less than 1mps. About half the time I’ve rebooted the gateway, and the other half I had not - it’s not clear whether that had an impact or not on the connection quality/speed. I have noticed that upload speeds since August 1st have actually doubled to around 12mps - I’d rather have my old 100mps download/6mps upload speeds. Through all this my 5G connection has been steady at 3 bars.
It’s clear to me T Mobile instituted a change to their 5G service right around the end of July/first of August. While my speeds do average higher than my DSL service, the quality and consistency of the 5G service falls short. I will try giving T Mobile support another chance and see if I can get back to my high download speeds. Otherwise the gains I have now over DSL may not be worth the frustration over the drop offs. Stay tuned…..
- BigJonRoaming Rookie
Update Nimber 2:
About a week ago, I thought my second replacement (third overall) Arcadyan KVD21 had joined the ranks of the previous ones and failed. For one week I was without internet connectivity except falling back to my DSL line (which I haven’t disconnected yet; still waiting to see if I could get what’s promised with the T Mobile service). I tried all the usual remedies, and then involved customer support who sent a couple of updates to the gateway which required my power cycling the thing again, with no change. I couldn’t even get a ping response much of the time. Download speeds, if measurable at all, were around 1 mps or less. Customer Support authorized another replacement gateway.
Upon receiving my replacement two days ago, I tried checking the existing gateway again. I was shocked to see a ping response of around 40 ms (70 was the norm when working) and download speeds at around 190 mps. I decided to not setup the new gateway and study the performance of the one I thought had died.
I have to knock on wood: for two full days now my existing gateway has been performing with ping speeds of 40-70 ms and an average download speed of 140 mps. Astounding. I believe the T Mobile engineers have changed something. I’m now getting the speeds I had at first try with the 5G internet and improved connection stability; even with the high speeds I have not experienced any signal drop offs or other bugs that I was experiencing earlier. I am at this point not going to set up the new gateway and just send it back to T Mobile.
Kudos to the T Mobile engineers for doing whatever it is that appears to solve the bedeviling problems I was having. It is too bad there is not a way to coordinate with their customer support to let users like me know some big change is coming. While I didn’t like not having a high speed connection for a week, the current performance gives me hope. T Mobile will have a fantastic product if the performance I’m experiencing now stays constant.
Any one else experience this sudden turnaround for the better?
- DAFreasNetwork Novice
I have a ARC KVD21 Gateway. It says I have very good service 4 bars. There is no way I am receiving 5G service. Checking speed tests, the best I recorded was upload of 13.5 and download of 3.47. I had better speed than that years ago with dialup internet. Dropping signal, and many issues trying to stream programs. Trying to use zoom to talk with my daughter and grandkids cutting out. Not happy with this at all.
- CindyNNewbie Caller
My devices will not work if the system automatically switches to a lower speed than 5G. After calling T Mobile many times, one person finally told me to go into settings and take off the “automatic” setting on band sleek and only set it to 5G. That has helped, except that my gateway continues to reset. I have to go through the setup process over and over. I could never use T Mobile if I was working from home. It is very unstable.
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