T-Mobile Home Internet throttling speeds to certain servers (10x reduction)
My T-Mobile Home Internet service (unlimited plan) has been working great for the past 18 months. Download speeds consistently in the 175-450 mbps range (usually 250-350) when running speedtest.net using Ethernet connection to my gateway. 2 weeks ago my download speed suddenly dropped to 15-30 mbps consistently (speedtest.net) - a 10x reduction. Strangely enough my upload speed remained good at 25-50 mbps consistently. There’s a long story about many calls into Home Internet and Customer Care support numbers, bottom line is that everyone kept telling me it’s a cellular problem (connection between tower and my gateway) probably caused by shifting antenna positions on the tower due to the maintenance. This never made any sense because why would my upload speed not be affected if the cellular connection was bad? Making even less sense: All the metrics on my gateway look very good: 4 bars displayed on front panel, 5G RSRQ of -11, 5G RSRP of -72, 5G SINR of 40, 5G band N41. Today I discovered the real problem. Using speedtest.net one can select different test servers. It turns out speedtest.net has been automatically selecting servers that produce the very slow download speed results. Manually selecting other servers, I found some servers always give good download speed results, other servers always give bad download speed results. This is entirely repeatable and consistent. So is it a problem with those specific test servers speedtest.net uses? It turns out no. My next test was to enable a VPN connection using NordVPN to one of their VPN servers in a different USA city. I went back and ran speedtest.net to all of the slow servers, all of them were back up to good/fast download speeds when tested through the VPN. In fact all of the available servers in speedtest.net now reported good/fast download speeds (when tested through the VPN). Conclusion: It really seems like T-Mobile Home Internet is artificially throttling connection speeds to certain servers. There is obviously nothing wrong with my Gateway nor my cellular connection to the tower because through the VPN I can always get good download speeds from all of the test servers. 100% repeatable and consistent results. Sadly none of their technical group personnel seem to know this - they always check their coverage map and say I’m in a bad spot and the problem must be a bad cellular connection (despite the good metrics reported by my gateway). T-Mobile advertises that their unlimited Home Internet service does not throttle other than for tower congestion, which is entirely reasonable. However my testing shows that they are throttling for other reasons. I’ve communicated this additional information to the support ticket I’ve had open for the past couple of weeks, will be interesting to see if they will do anything with it.
Cellular data not working in Chicago area.
My cellular data (iPhone14 pro)has been going in and out and if it's even working it's extremely slow. A speed test hit a high of 20mps. My phone will show full 5Guc butnot load and and disconnect from the internet. It will switchbetween 5Guc, 5G, LTE, E, and SOS mode.Using WiFi there are zero issues. Ialso was ona Sprint plan and upgraded to a tmobile plan for “premium data”. It’s been this way overa month now in the Chicago area. Anyone else having these issues?
5G UC 4 bars, "unlimited premium data " but network so congested its unuseable.
Last might I had a very important video stream I had to be on, the call of a lifetime. I am on magenta max, with unlimited premium data, no deprioritization. My phone shows 5G UC with 4/5 signal bars, yet embarrassingly, my network could not handle the stream. When I do a speed test, half the time it won't connect, when it does the jitter is extremely high, meaning the ping is going up and down wildly second by second, the download speed is anywhere between 20Mbps-140Mbps, but the upload speed is almost non existent. It's anywhere between 0.0-1.0 mbps, .2, .04, .02 etc. How embarrassing, we have to cancel the entitr event, and why? Because I'm on the T-Mobil network. The network at my home is ALWAYS congested during peek hours, but it's usually not quitethis bad. The only thing I can think is that they have been giving away so many cheap $100 phones on the metro network. Yes, I've heard the trick and yeah sometimes when the network slows down I can switch to the 4g lte and get a momentary return to connectivity. After about 10 minutes this usually slows down too and I can switch back and forth from 5g to 4g, sometimes it helps, sometimes not much. If I was on a cut rate carrier and paying $25 or $40 a month, it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm not. You expect to get what you pay for, right? Even though I'm supposed to have network priority over those who pay $30-$50 a month because I'm paying double, it seems there are just so many of them it doesn't matter. I usedto be on the Meteo network and yeah, after 35gb you get deprioritized, it sucked but it was expected. Also, Im sure they would not admit to it but they also at times block certain online gaming servers. It won't connect, but when you flip on the VPN, it works no problem. Except using the VPN as a middle man makes the already mediocre speed just a but worse. I've seen them tell other users that it's a software glitch that will be fixed with the next update....nah. I get it, their network is congested and they are trying to open up capacity while inconveniencing the smallest number of users. This is more of an irritant than major issue. The network being so congested its unusable is a big deal. Now they say they are ramping up 5g mid band to more areas. Seems like they just care about getting everybody "covered" not that their network performs to expectations. Of course I've gone through tech support where they *reset* your connection. It works better for a couple hours, i think they are just temporarily giving you super prioritization on the network so you come absolutely first for a short time. Is there something I'm missing here? Is there nothing to do aside from seeing if another carrier's network is better in my area?
Connection=Excellent Download Speed=POOR!!
Been watching buffering circles on my TV every few minutes for several hours; on hold for support now 45 minutes and counting. . . Connection reads “excellent”; Download speed=POOR. How do I get help??? Have I told so many people in my community how happy I’ve been that my tower can’t handle the new accounts? Seriously, why would my download speed be so sluggish, and what can I do about it? Please note: Connection IS excellent, so I do not need an extender. And I have now been on hold for an hour. Shall I just quite T-Mo Internet and go back to Verizon?Why does TMobile Home Internet throttle only Live TV apps on FireTV Cube?
Why does TMobile Home Internet throttle only Live TV apps on FireTV Cube? All other streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime etc) work fine. My LiveTV iptv app buffers every 15 sec then freezes for 2 or 3 minutes, then buffers again, repeat this sequence over and over. This just started happening this weekend. I've had this same TMobile Home Internet & the apps mentioned for 2+ years. I talked to customer service who called in “expert engineer” to diagnose, said shed call me back - its been 2 days, no call back. Can anyone help me?Throttled into oblivion
Moved to Germany on orders and made the mistake of keeping t-mobile. Kids quickly used up the 5 gigs of high-speed data while we were waiting for our home Internet to be installed. Now, we're finding out our 'unlimited' slower speed data is actually very limited. Rather than 256 kbps, we can occasionally get 60 kbps. The speed is so slow and the signal so intermittent that we have trouble loading a plain-text E-mail, we can't login to apps, and most web pages stall out. High-speed data was used up on the 25th of August. T-mobile messaged that our next allocation of high-speed data would begin on the 23rd of September. Guess I'll have to drop t-mobile as soon possible. What an absolute disappointment of a service.
T-Mobile throttling data on Maganta-Max
My plan is on Magenta Max which means I’m supposed to have unlimited everything and no throttling whatsoever according to T-Mobil advertisement, but if I do internet speed test with fast.com, my speed won’t pass 2.7 mbps while I’m doing the test with VPN on I get more than 100 mbps. If it’s not a false advertisement why my data is being compromised and being throttled?