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Timsw
LTE Learner
Joined 4 years ago
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Re: Home internet "connected without internet"
asturcon wrote: Ok... I got my problem solve after 9 hours waiting for customer service!!!!!! They send the gateway with the wrong SIM... They fixed it really fast, but the waiting time was ridiculous. Anyway, now everything is working great. Good to hear you got it going! Thanks for telling us about the wrong SIM issue, as I’ve never heard of that happening. I’ll know to mention that to people now as a possibility along with not being activated, as to why it won’t connect. Hopefully, now it will be smooth sailing from here on, as it usually is for I’d say, at least half of us luckier customers. The most unfortunate ones are in the maybe 10% of people who just are in a terrible location for this service to work well for them. I try to be optimistic that the new year will bring technology breakthroughs that will make this service better and faster for all users, but I’m a little wary as the TMHI customer base grows from the present 500,000 of us 5G internet pioneers on TMHI in this first year, to over 7M users by 2025. It’s been great for me for six months now. .122Views1like0CommentsRe: Home internet "connected without internet"
Did you get an email two days before you got the gateway that says “Your account has been ACTIVATED.” I saw a video of a person setting this up and they got the same thing as you, looks like everything goes well, but no internet. It may be because, they slipped up and didn’t activate your account. Call Customer Service at TMO and ask them to activate your T Mobile Home Internet account. They can tell if it has been activated or not. Then when it’s activated, it should work. Also, if you call Customer Service in the very early morning hours, you can always get straight through. Before you do this though, you might first try restarting the gateway via the button on the side of it, because that might work also.93Views1like0CommentsRe: Upload speeds much faster than download speeds
So you’re in a little one TMO tower Texas town. Right, antenna won’t help. You had good speeds for that far away. I was trying to help one guy here who was really close to his tower with terrible speeds and I told him to go look at it. He did and the antenna array was pointed in the opposite direction from his house. If only all people’s problems could be so easy to pinpoint. That’s good to have those sight-lines from the 2nd floor of your house, and good gateway placement also.79Views1like0CommentsRe: Upload speeds much faster than download speeds
I’m puzzled by the 2nd gateway working well for a while unless maybe you were getting another tower or something? But you did a smart thing to try going up to your nearest tower and finding something was wrong with the download when you were getting 5 bars close to it. I mean that sounds like a tower problem. If I were in your place, facing the more expensive Starlink, I’d have a look at a tower map, and see where the next closest tower is, and get on the side of your house where that is, either outdoors or with the gateway in a window facing that tower. If you can pick that up at all, you might do well trying an external antenna. Otherwise you’re don’t have options, given that TMO can’t verify that there’s anything wrong with the tower. When troubleshooting these issues, it’s worth paying attention to the band(s) you are on, and the metrics in the dropdown arrows when both Overview and Status are selected in the left column of the GUI at 192.168.12.1 Do you know if you were on the same band(s) when the trouble started as you were when the speeds were good for your first weeks? I understand that you used the gateway when testing near the tower and had your phones on wifi, but are they TMO phones by any chance and when the gateway went so slow, what were your phone speeds at home not through wifi? Also, to absolutely verify it is that specific tower, you can take your gateway near another tower and see what speeds you get there. I find the ookla 5G tower map online the easiest to use to find other 5G towers in the area. Varying speeds is one thing, but you are right in that speeds shouldn’t be varying down to unusable, and I think of that as anything below 30. I’m 5.1 miles from the tower and get 200 to 400 down, and 30 to 45 up on combinations with the mid-frequency n41, like B2/n41 and B66/n41. Before this, my best choice was 7/1 speeds on DSL. I’m very lucky to get reliable service at these speeds for the last 6 months, but one big thing in my favor is almost nothing between me and the tower in the way of obstructions. Another is not a crowded market as far as number of customers on the tower. I’ve only called customer service once, as my secondary signal went out and my speed dropped to like 50. But the guy was very helpful and told me it was a problem at the tower and there was a ticket out to fix it, and it had been reported by others. A problem like yours should be something that is reported by others also. Even though they in effect said, we’ve done everything we can do, if you call in the early morning hours, you can always get straight through and they’re not busy then, and I would just tell them what you did with the gateway to test your tower. They should appreciate your initiative and understand that shows how much you want TMHI to work for you.43Views1like0CommentsRe: Auto switch to different tower when primary tower goes down.
Often, when a tower goes down, the gateway will switch to another band or another tower seamlessly, dynamically. If the 5G equipment goes down on your nearest tower, sometimes the 4G will still be fine, although giving you a much slower speed usually. However, if your second nearest tower is too far away, you may not connect to it at all, even if your nearest tower is completely down, It helps to know the position of these towers so that, for example, if your nearest tower is to the East, but your next nearest tower is to the West, it will help to pick up that tower by placing the gateway in a window on the West side of your house, if possible. When you lose connection to the internet completely, the first thing you should do is try to restart the gateway using the button on the side. You probably know this. After pressing it once to turn off, pause for 5 seconds, and then press again to turn it back and wait the two minutes it takes to reconnect. I’m not sure if the gateway gets more stuck on a certain band or band combination than a cell phone would, but I know for sure that some people when they lose their connection, and patiently waited 3 hours for it to reconnect, they could have reconnected quickly had they just rebooted the gateway immediately, using the method I described above. Same is true for when a tower that has been down comes up. You might not connect to it, and should try a restart every once in a while. However, I understand you called up and your tower is down, so rebooting until the cows come home isn’t going to help, until the tower is fixed. The phone people never (or very rarely) are aware of how long before the tower will be fixed. They aren’t given that information. I’d say the usual time is one to four days. For some people, it’s only a few hours. For others, it’s over a month. The phone people can tell only if it is down or up most of the time. Sometimes they know if a tower is scheduled for a 5G upgrade though, as over half of TMO’s towers are not yet upgraded, but will be in the coming months. In my experience, even here on this board, some people -- not you -- are terrible at describing their problem, and also letting the person on the phone know that you have some understanding of how all this works, or no understanding. For example, a question recently on a message board, a person asked how could they tell what speed they get. So you have someone calling up like that, who has never done a speed test, and then you have me, who took a little computer programming 50 years ago when I was in college, more courses later on, and have used computers off and on ever since. It helps if you just kindly tell them your level of understanding. Also, I think a little empathy is in order when dealing with the phone help, wherever they are from. They don’t earn a lot, nor do they set company policy, or have control over how long you had to wait on the phone to get through to them. Try to call in the early morning hours when you get right through, and they’ll take their time with you. I’m just writing some of this for the general audience here. They have to deal with people who call up who are angry, frustrated, upset, inarticulate, sometimes not very intelligent, hard to understand. I’m sure they get together during coffee breaks and talk about their worst customers, and maybe some who were the kindest to them. You can locate your nearest towers and their positions, although not all towers are always on it, on the online Ookla 5G tower map. It is simple to use by clicking in and the towers are big black and red dots. But first keep left-clicking in to your location.65Views0likes0CommentsRe: Can't connect Google Mini to T-Mobile Home Internet
Ramon_92 wrote: I think I changed it because it's not letting me in I never even use those extra windows that require a password. The GUI is very limited in terms of custom configuration. Is it something you need to change because you are trying to install an external router or what? If it’s important and you’re willing to start all over again, I think you can do a factory reset of the gateway by depressing the hole, which is located in the inset panel on the gateway, holding for a time, and then starting all over again with the setup. I think that should allow you to lose your old password that you forgot and start all over again.33Views0likes0CommentsRe: Can't connect Google Mini to T-Mobile Home Internet
Ramon_92 wrote: I'm trying to access the main settings for the network using 192.168.12.1 but looks like it has different password for the admin, does anyone know the default password? I tried the one under the router already I’m assuming you selected “System” and it’s asking you to enter admin and a password. The password is the one on the bottom of the gateway. After entering the password, the first screen I come to is one that allows you to change your password to something easier to remember or enter. Do you think you may have done that before and forgot?44Views0likes0CommentsRe: Home Internet Gateway Needs Reboot Multiple Times Daily, Internet Access Dropping
okboomer wrote: One thing the agent told me that I found interesting is that they have a new gateway, which she implied is not made by Nokia, and that they will be shipping it out to existing customers early next year once it completes testing. Evidently, they’ve had a lot of issues with the Nokia device. There have been rumors of a new gateway, and I’m glad you mentioned that to confirm it and when it might be out. On the topic of disconnection, I had them about every other day, at least, for over two months and then after the 1609 firmware update, they just stopped completely. I’ve read a lot of comments, and I’ve never read of ANYONE with the disconnection problem who called up, and then something the rep said or did fixed it. It’s just a component of connection quality and maybe if the new gateway has better antennas, that will improve connection quality. The drastic speed drop during high-traffic hours happens to some unlucky people though, and it kind of mystifies me because one of the features of 5G is supposed to be its ability to handle exponentially more bandwidth per tower than 4G. My high-traffic speed drop is not that significant, from 300 to maybe 150, but only for hours between about 3:30PM to 5PM. Your 2 years of a fast, stable connection with Spectrum at $30/month means that for two years you have a good alternative, and you’ll be able to follow comments of people on how the new gateway is in regard to speed consistency and dropped connections, and in general how T Mobile home internet does as it goes from the present 350,000 customers to millions. It could get worse, who knows.35Views0likes0CommentsRe: Disable secondary (5G) connection
Eric_S wrote: My router is currently running firmware version 1.2101.00.1609. Anyone know when this version was pushed to the field? Eric People got 1609 over a month ago. If your problem started just a few weeks ago, it probably has nothing to do with the update. You can request they send you a white box 4G modem/router. They probably have warehouse full of them after most people exchanged them for the 5G model. I assume you’ve tried various placements with the gateway, since one might promote getting the 4G signal. The gateway can also be rotated and restarted, to see if you are more likely to get a faster connection that way.83Views0likes0CommentsRe: Band locking
fixerjm wrote: ... when will we be allowed to through a firmware update to lock the bands? My trashcan keeps switching back to primary B71(LTE) and no secondary connection. Band-locking by selecting a setting isn’t a thing and won’t be in the next few years anyway. The cellular system is designed to do the opposite -- drift seamlessly between towers/bands as people move around, and for traffic distribution, without any interruption in a call or internet. Some people are located between two or more towers, roughly equal distant. That can be a problem. The 5G connection you want is a non-standalone signal pair, 4G/5G, primary/secondary, B-band/n-band. The trick is to find a location and orientation for your gateway that will somehow not leave you stuck on your slow primary-only 4G connection. Other people, like Bond, are near both the n71 and n41, and not picking up the one they wanted, the higher speed n41. No gateway location/orientation could help him and he needed a better and more directional antenna than the ones that are included in the gateway. In that way, he was able to position and aim it in a way to get the bands he wanted and avoid the ones he didn’t. When you’re experimenting with positions for the gateway and trying it in a new position, if you haven’t had it unplugged, turn it off via the button on the side, let it sit for 5 seconds to forget the band it was on, and then start it again and see what bands you’re connecting to and what speeds you’re getting. Do a few speed tests. I’ve read of cases where this works, a gateway repositioning that solves the getting stuck on 4G alone problem. But more often, it doesn’t work. Again, just an unfortunate location you’re in, in relation to towers. About choice, you have them. You can move to a location closer to a tower. You can try an external antenna. You can try another provider that works better at your house.57Views0likes0Comments