TMobile Home internet

I had great speeds etc until recently.
Now I can only seem to get 4 MB/s.

No matter where I put the device it only seems to get 2-3 bars out of 5.

I’m walking distance from a 5G tower...

Well after calling customer support again, I spoke with a rep who I could understand LOL.  She went through all the trouble shooting steps again and we went through the rebooting process, moving the tower inches at a time and checking for signal strength.  The young lady did say TMobile was in the process of upgrading our local tower and has been since April,although I have not seen anyone on the tower is a few months :(  Anyway every time I do a reboot it connects to the same B2 and n71 signals.  But at least now I can watch a you tube video without having to buffer every 10 seconds early in the mornings.  Download speed is averaging 10 + or - 2 and upload is 30 to 40 LOL.

She did say Tech support may call early next week to speak with me.  At 4:50 pm AZ time  with a full 5 bars I have download at 6.71 and upload is 32.8

At this rate I really don’t see any reason to keep this system, We get better speeds from our hotspot. But will most likely tough it out for a month or so just to see what happens.

I was doing some reading this afternoon on how cell towers work, as I’m just learning about all this stuff starting last month. I stumbled across some pieces of information which might conceivably account for someone a mile away from a tower not receiving good speed, although since Bill receives between 4 and 5 bars signal strength, and that’s probably a better indicator of cell tower reach to his house than internet speed, then these two things probably don’t apply to his situation.

High signal strength with poor speed usually means interference, either from obstructions or another tower’s signal, or from something like a nearby electrical power station.

Some towers have “directional characteristics,” rather than being completely omnidirectional and transmitting equally in every degree of 360 degrees. So a person’s house might be located in a sort of dead spot, because in that direction there is mostly nothing for miles.

Another possibility is a tower’s power being turned down, so it doesn’t have nearly as much reach as the average tower. This is very common in cities, that a tower gets turned down, when it interferes with the signal from a neighboring tower’s cell (area of coverage). But it can also happen in rural areas for the same reason.

More than a few people who were in the rollout of this T mobile home internet, said they got good speed for a few weeks, or a few months, and then suddenly it dropped off and was really slow. One recent post from a guy in Brooklyn reported that on the second day of use, he got double the speed range of his first day of use. And I’ve read where some people’s speeds got faster through their first weeks or months.

The Nokia gateway that T mobile uses has a maximum power draw of 36 watts. I’ve measured it only up to 25 watts, when it is busy streaming. It idles at 12 watts, like when you are surfing web pages and not using great volumes of data. This gives the gateway an advantage in signal strength over a cell phone, including the best $1000+ 5G phone you can buy. When a phone is very low on battery, it can have trouble reaching a tower that is far away. This gateway shouldn’t have that problem it is plugged into the wall and has 36 watts at its disposal.

Wireless technology is advancing at a feverish pace though.It’s only a matter of time before we all have very fast internet speeds through improved 5G technology. It is only just beginning.

BouseBill wrote:

The tower is sitting under an a/c vent, so heat is not a problem.

This morining at 0500 the download is at 21.13

and the upload is 40.74 as tested on speedtest.net

 

I had mine sitting on top of an A/C vent that ran 24 / 7 and I still had issues.  I now have a fan on the bottom and top of the device and am setting at a 13 day uptime right now which is almost my longest time.  We may be fighting separate issues since I’m only going over a 4G signal.

Hi Bill, you gave all the information I wish more people would give when seeking help with their slow speeds.

It is really strange getting that low a download speed compared to your upload speed. I would have called the service people also. And with your 1 mile clear sight lines from the tower, if you were getting the n41 5G band instead of n71, you should be getting speeds in excess of 100Mpbs on the download, and perhaps as high as 200. That’s something you might inquire further about with T mobile, if they have any plans to upgrade your tower to the n41 band.

I have gotten as high as 190 download and 30 upload and I am 5 miles away from the tower. My average download speed is about 90 though, and lowest I get now is 35 or so. I’m very happy with this, after the slow DSL speeds I was on.

The bands with the prefix of B are the 4G bands, like the B2 you listed, and the 5G band is your n71. And 5G works in a “non stand-alone” relationship with 4G. So you are getting 5G, and that’s the good news. (If you were getting only 4G, you would get a Primary signal alone, with no Secondary “n” signal.)

The bad news is that the newer n41 mid-frequency 5G band is the one you want in your signal pair, rather than the low-frequency n71, because n71 yields a lower range of speeds to begin with, and the fast speed you can get within a block of the tower tends to decrease rapidly with distance, in some cases anyway.

T mobile is gradually replacing the n71 equipment with the faster n41 in many areas. The mid-frequency rights are the ones they acquired from their merger with Sprint and the ones they want to use to spearhead their rollout of 5G. But, yes, they are using n71, too.

So it’s possible you might be stuck with the n71 for a while. I’ve read of a few instances where it happened to people though, just in the last three or four months. That is, their speed increased dramatically one day, and noticed they were getting a Secondary on the n41 band.

As far as I know, they do not put the n71 on the same tower as an n41.

But there are some things you can try now. First, be sure your gateway is within 15 feet of the computer or phone (set on wifi) you are doing the speed testing on, all in the same room. (I used to keep my DSL modem/router about 25 feet away, two rooms away, and it worked fine, but that apparently doesn’t work at all with this gateway. It needs to be close.)

Second, try the gateway in all sorts of locations, doing multiple speed tests at each location. Try puting the gateway below the window sill level, instead of in the window.

I even took my gateway outside, and on the roof (speed was bad), using a portable power supply, but you can also use an extension cord. This is just to see if there is ANYWHERE where you can get a faster speed on a speed test. I know of one person who made a video where he got 20Mbps in his house, max, but on a pole above his roof he got 140Mbps. Being handy, he knew how to cover and insulate it, ventilate it with a fan, and ground it properly. Even so, to anyone going this extreme, you might end up owning the $400 gateway. 

You don’t have to get on the roof, but try it outside if you can, just to see. Or, if you’re getting 5 bars in the window, try opening the window. I don’t know, maybe you have triple pane windows with a coating that blocks the signal. Then again, you’re getting a pretty good upload speed. What is up with that? Does anyone reading this have an idea or experience with what that means?

Also, what you want to do when testing and maybe finding a fast speed location for your gateway, check what bands you are on. You were on the B2/n71 5G combo and maybe another time you get the B66/n71.

Also, you can experiment with trying to connect to different bands by turning the gateway on and off, via the button on the gateway. That reboots it. However, sometimes you just connect to the same bands over and over. The gateway takes a full 2 minutes to reset, but the connection will come on by itself, connecting any devices you may have also. In other words, no need to click on your wifi name and enter a password or anything like that. It knows your wifi name and password after the first time you did it.

On the off chance you have a microwave in operation anywhere near the gateway, this can slow the speed considerably, but less so if you are on a newer computer with the 5Ghz wifi instead of the older 2.4. Still, just thought I mention it. I do a crazy amount of microwaving and noticed that early on. Had to move that farther away when an older computer was being used. 

Well, see if any of this changes anything. It’s worth a try.

Do you have a 5G phone by any chance, or perhaps a friend who is on T mobile with their 5G phone and could test that out at your house, using the cellular signal of course, not the wifi from your gateway? If they got really good speeds from their 5G phone on a T mobile tower, then you would know you might have a problem with your gateway. That might be good to know.

I have only a 4G phone. It can still do tower mapping through the wifi signal on the gateway, telling me what tower I’m connecting to using a tower mapping app.

So try some of this stuff if you can, and get back to us. This might be a mystery that can be solved. Even with the n71, that is still a very slow download speed and something is wrong. Could be a bad modem/router.

I’m editing this because I thought of one more thing. Reading your reply to Jlillard, the hot gateway guy, you got a 20 download at 5am, which is when I tend to get the highest speeds also.

But try doing a test on fast.com, because there’s a weird thing about the gateway that it connects to servers sometimes that are way out of state for the speed test, not that that gives an incorrect speed always, but it might be a good idea to try a different test, just in case. I like alternating between tests anyway.. The Fast.com test only give you the upload speed if you click on the box after doing the download speed for the first time. 

The tower is sitting under an a/c vent, so heat is not a problem.

This morining at 0500 the download is at 21.13

and the upload is 40.74 as tested on speedtest.net

You might try adding a fan to see if cooling it down keeps your speeds up.