New 5G Home Internet user, trying to get information

[GracieAllen]

Small town, south of Minneapolis, MN.

 

Just started using a 5G T-Mobile Home Internet (Sagemcomm FAST 5688W) gateway a week ago.  Speeds seem wildly variable and intermittent extremely low speeds occur daily.  Our load is modest with 1 desktop PC, a laptop, 720p tv, and a 480p (SD) tv AT MOST.

 

I've been intermittently using testmy.net for the last 4-5 days, interval currently set at 10 minutes, download only, to determine when and for how long the slowdowns occur.  Is this a reasonable approach?  Do I need to set the interval to 5 minutes to more accurately determine the time and duration of the slowdowns?

 

 

[xs1]

5 hours ago, GracieAllen said:

Small town, south of Minneapolis, MN.

 

Just started using a 5G T-Mobile Home Internet (Sagemcomm FAST 5688W) gateway a week ago.  Speeds seem wildly variable and intermittent extremely low speeds occur daily.  Our load is modest with 1 desktop PC, a laptop, 720p tv, and a 480p (SD) tv AT MOST.

 

I've been intermittently using testmy.net for the last 4-5 days, interval currently set at 10 minutes, download only, to determine when and for how long the slowdowns occur.  Is this a reasonable approach?  Do I need to set the interval to 5 minutes to more accurately determine the time and duration of the slowdowns?

 

 

 

 

Honestly with 5G, wide variations in speed will not be addressed as this is to be expected.. its cellular service... similar satellite everything becomes a variable to why speeds fluctuate; weather, location, peak usage times, other interfering devices, etc. There is little, if anything, that they will do for you. 

 

https://testmy.net/host-history/t_mobile_usa

 

Check that out for example. WIDE spread results are entirely normal unfortunately. 

[GracieAllen]

Thanks for the reply...

 

I'm not particularly bothered by the wild fluctuations, as long as the lowest speeds are high enough that everything keeps working.  Today, OUR load has been minimal - one computer doing little if anything with Internet data, and one TV at 720p - so basically 1 TV.

 

Attached (maybe) is the graph from 5 a.m. this morning to 10 pm this evening (not sure where it'll show up, but I uploaded it)...

 

All night it bounces around like crazy, and at 5 a.m. it jumps from 31 Mbps to 130, then back down to 80.  And starts a gradual decline until around 11:00 the lows are below 10 Mbps.  And gets worse.  Then shortly after noon it goes back up and stays at around 30 Mbps for a while, and around 2 pm, it falls on it's face with a whole BUNCH of values well below 1 Mbps and barely getting into the teens Mbps all the way through 10 pm...  So, at LEAST 8 HOURS of miserable performance on a Sunday night.  And it looked very much the same most evenings last week.  Generally it didn't deteriorate QUITE this early, but once it hit "kids coming home from school" time, it pretty much tanks every day.

 

We've got three towers the Home Internet uses (according to T-Mobile support).  One "has problems" and T-Mobile excluded our gateway from that one (I have no idea HOW they did this, but I was TOLD they did).  The tower it's USING (again, according to T-Mobile) is straight South about 2 blocks and I can see it from where the box is.  The third one is East and less than 1/4 mile, and again, I can look out the window at it.

 

Both cell phones act the same way when in 5G.  If I turn OFF 5G on the cell phones I get about 180 Mbps at WORST, and generally around 260.  This is all using speedtest.net.  Unfortunately, the HI box doesn't have the ability to exclude 5G and use LTE.  I presume it was the cheapest, simplest device they could come up with to provide at no additional charge.  Very little configurability and apparently not smart enough to pick the band/service/whatever that appears to have the most available capacity...

 

I can live with the wide fluctuations as long as they stay HIGH enough at the worst so the service doesn't get down to the point where it's unusable...  I'll try talking to T-Mobile Support again tomorrow, but if this service is going to be this crummy for an extended period, the Home Internet box is going back as we're within the 15-day window through this week.

[xs1]

On 12/25/2022 at 11:35 PM, GracieAllen said:

Thanks for the reply...

 

I'm not particularly bothered by the wild fluctuations, as long as the lowest speeds are high enough that everything keeps working.  Today, OUR load has been minimal - one computer doing little if anything with Internet data, and one TV at 720p - so basically 1 TV.

 

Attached (maybe) is the graph from 5 a.m. this morning to 10 pm this evening (not sure where it'll show up, but I uploaded it)...

 

All night it bounces around like crazy, and at 5 a.m. it jumps from 31 Mbps to 130, then back down to 80.  And starts a gradual decline until around 11:00 the lows are below 10 Mbps.  And gets worse.  Then shortly after noon it goes back up and stays at around 30 Mbps for a while, and around 2 pm, it falls on it's face with a whole BUNCH of values well below 1 Mbps and barely getting into the teens Mbps all the way through 10 pm...  So, at LEAST 8 HOURS of miserable performance on a Sunday night.  And it looked very much the same most evenings last week.  Generally it didn't deteriorate QUITE this early, but once it hit "kids coming home from school" time, it pretty much tanks every day.

 

We've got three towers the Home Internet uses (according to T-Mobile support).  One "has problems" and T-Mobile excluded our gateway from that one (I have no idea HOW they did this, but I was TOLD they did).  The tower it's USING (again, according to T-Mobile) is straight South about 2 blocks and I can see it from where the box is.  The third one is East and less than 1/4 mile, and again, I can look out the window at it.

 

Both cell phones act the same way when in 5G.  If I turn OFF 5G on the cell phones I get about 180 Mbps at WORST, and generally around 260.  This is all using speedtest.net.  Unfortunately, the HI box doesn't have the ability to exclude 5G and use LTE.  I presume it was the cheapest, simplest device they could come up with to provide at no additional charge.  Very little configurability and apparently not smart enough to pick the band/service/whatever that appears to have the most available capacity...

 

I can live with the wide fluctuations as long as they stay HIGH enough at the worst so the service doesn't get down to the point where it's unusable...  I'll try talking to T-Mobile Support again tomorrow, but if this service is going to be this crummy for an extended period, the Home Internet box is going back as we're within the 15-day window through this week.

 

 

My buddy has the same T-Mobile box as of current at his apartment..  He averages about 150 mb/s max download and 40 upload.. He lives next tot he airport and should ideally have the best possible outcome since he can throw a rock and hit the tower. It's not the best unfortunately.. There are no guarantees. Oddly enough, I have 5GUC (cell) through T-Mobile and its almost unusable at nights here at home. Well, that may be a bit harsh..  Its usable, just not great. 

[GracieAllen]

I'm sure there are a million people who are getting great results.  When we were on Visible and never got over 10-15 Mbps on a GOOD day, there were people claiming they were getting 250 Mbps and NEVER got below 100.

 

The LATEST strangeness is what happened a couple days ago.  Talked to T-Mobile on Tuesday, and the person there essentially contradicted everything I was told LAST WEEK.  And wrote another ticket for the "engineers" to see if there were any problems.   Tuesday no change.  On Wednesday morning the floundered along with it's usual performance, and then this:

 

 

Sometime between the 6:26 and 6:36 tests, the network jumped to almost FIVE HUNDRED Mbps....  It continued 'til 8  a.m. then started slowing down, but the entire day stayed drastically higher than it's been since we got the T-Mobile service.

 

 

Here's the graph from 5 a.m. to 10 pm.

 

And it continued yesterday.  I talked to T-Mobile again and the answer from the same person as Tuesday was that the engineers found some problem and fixed it.  And he stated that this WILL be permanent.  I guess we'll see. 

 

There's still the problem of sudden speed drops that last for some unknown amount of time, but it's better than any time since we got the service.  Problem with the monitoring is it's not constant, so it could be at .25 Mbps for 9 minutes and 50 seconds and be 300 Mbps during the test.  But, it's better than it was, and MOST of the time, the drops don't drop so far that everything quits.  Yesterday that happened once - it dropped well below 1 Mbps long enough for both TVs to buffer, both computers to get kicked off the networks, and 4 minutes later the box crashed and rebooted.  I HOPE that's not going to become a habit...

 

We got them to extend the trial for a week so we can see what happens through the weekend and into next week.  If it keeps working, we'll keep it...

[91Wagovanman]

@GracieAllenI will gladly trade you any of your lowest (12-20 Mbps) speeds. I have Hughesnet satellite here in NW GA and my average speed is around 3-5 Mbps my upload speeds are a dismally constant 700 ish Kbps. Most TV's and PC's wont become unusable til around the single digit download speeds happen ( I mean 1-3 Mbps) I only have 1 PC hardwired to my router. Occasionally I will hook up the Xbox If I am getting particularly good speeds ( which I equate to 10 + Mbps) It takes so much time to load most pages on my PC that I wish for dial up speeds again ( at least they were consistantly bad)

[GracieAllen]

You missed the REAL "lowest speeds"...  We routinely have drops to below 1 Mbps that last anywhere from a few seconds  'til long enough that the channel loses the connection, OR the Home Internet box crashes.  But, it usually only crashes about once per day, so it's better than the first box we had.

 

And I praised T-Mobile TOO SOON about the miracle...  It lasted about 36 HOURS.  Between 6:20 and 8 pm last night the network went from the speeds above, back to being where we were BEFORE the improvement...  In the last hour, running at 5 minute intervals, the monitor got 4.8, 10.3, 3.3, 0.7, 9.8, 2.3, 28.8, 3.4, 3.8, 5.2 and 5.1 Mbps.  So ONE reading over 10 Mbps, 6 of 11 BELOW 5 Mbps. From what I saw on the Internet, an SD TV at 480 P uses around 1.5 Mbps, and one at 720 P is somewhere around 5.5 Mbps.  Either way, I'm pretty sure it's more than .7 Mbps, and the 720 P TV is more than all those 3 or 4 Mbps periods.  Needless to say there was a LOT of buffering, drop outs, being dumped back to the "Watch Now" screen or the Roku demanding we exit from everything a find a network to connect to.

 

And YEAH, it's been power cycled - it takes care of that by crashing periodically.  How does the Home Internet box handle losing contact with the tower?  Does it go looking for somewhere else to connect, sit quietly and wait for the lost tower, or crash and reboot?

 

Anyhow, for about 2 days it worked well most of the time, and the lows were high enough that browsing, downloads and TVs didn't have any problems.  Unfortunately, despite being told very explicitly that the speed improvement WAS PERMANENT, that appears not to be the case.

 

 

 

[xs1]

On 12/31/2022 at 11:51 PM, GracieAllen said:

You missed the REAL "lowest speeds"...  We routinely have drops to below 1 Mbps that last anywhere from a few seconds  'til long enough that the channel loses the connection, OR the Home Internet box crashes.  But, it usually only crashes about once per day, so it's better than the first box we had.

 

And I praised T-Mobile TOO SOON about the miracle...  It lasted about 36 HOURS.  Between 6:20 and 8 pm last night the network went from the speeds above, back to being where we were BEFORE the improvement...  In the last hour, running at 5 minute intervals, the monitor got 4.8, 10.3, 3.3, 0.7, 9.8, 2.3, 28.8, 3.4, 3.8, 5.2 and 5.1 Mbps.  So ONE reading over 10 Mbps, 6 of 11 BELOW 5 Mbps. From what I saw on the Internet, an SD TV at 480 P uses around 1.5 Mbps, and one at 720 P is somewhere around 5.5 Mbps.  Either way, I'm pretty sure it's more than .7 Mbps, and the 720 P TV is more than all those 3 or 4 Mbps periods.  Needless to say there was a LOT of buffering, drop outs, being dumped back to the "Watch Now" screen or the Roku demanding we exit from everything a find a network to connect to.

 

And YEAH, it's been power cycled - it takes care of that by crashing periodically.  How does the Home Internet box handle losing contact with the tower?  Does it go looking for somewhere else to connect, sit quietly and wait for the lost tower, or crash and reboot?

 

Anyhow, for about 2 days it worked well most of the time, and the lows were high enough that browsing, downloads and TVs didn't have any problems.  Unfortunately, despite being told very explicitly that the speed improvement WAS PERMANENT, that appears not to be the case.

 

 

 

 

 

Wait for some bad weather lol.   During/after the hurricane we had here in FL, my T-Mobile service was "down" (other than text messages) for 6½ days.  3 weeks before that I couldn't use my phone at work. had 0 signal. T-Mobile said " there's a known issue, no resolution time given".  Its a tough choice because when its good, its pretty damn good. In Tampa, i was pulling over 500-600 mbps on my phone. But when its bad, its bad.   Its cellular... its a crap shoot. 

[GracieAllen]

I don't even want to THINK about what an incredible mess it must have been in Florida!

 

Box crashed a couple times again yesterday.  Last time it did, when it came back up the speeds were back to 300-400 Mbps.  Problem is, when it crashes or gets power-cycled, you never know if you're going to get 400 Mbps or 4 Mbps....

 

Talked to support to try to get some idea WHY the speeds are so DRASTICALLY different - not the constant massive changes from minute to minute, but why I can get 300 Mbps after one crash, then get back to a max of 50 and a min of 0 after the next.  NEVER DID GET ANY KIND OF USEFUL ANSWER.  Guy got totally hung up on "the gateway isn't communicating with the tower".  I kept telling him, I'm watching the computer run tests, and it's getting great speed...  I don't CARE if it's not "communicating with the tower".  Finally I asked him how I could tell when this communication problem was happening, and his answer was "Oh, you'll get REALLY SLOW SPEEDS."

 

HUH?

 

Anyway, he was DETERMINED that the box was no good 'cause it crashes daily or a little more frequently, and that I needed ANOTHER one.  Back to T-Mobile where this time they gave me one of the Arkadian (not sure how it's spelled) boxes instead of the Sagemcom.  Set it up,and we're back to speeds well UNDER 100 Mbps.

 

I'm starting to have the feeling that we're going to be dumping the sometimes 400 Mbps for a day and 50 - 0 Mbps for the next, for the SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD DSL that's only 20 Mbps, and rarely gets over 16, but at least it doesn't drop to less than 1Mbps at random points for varying amounts of time.  I'd LOVE to be wrong, and this thing starts working GREAT for the rest of the week...

 

[Dharness]

I have the t mobile home Internet as well it's usually around 20 to 40 mbs from the 5th when I pay the bill to the 30th 31st of the month then it drops works drops works constantly one second to the next then when I pay the bill back to working good enough to watch YouTube on my laptop while using my phone to browse Facebook watch videos on YouTube in news reports tiktok and play games which 20 mbs is good enough for that but it'll go clear up to 170 mbs but still not hold there I'm rarely over 30mbs but again I'm ok with that because it works but starting like clock work 12/30 12 am the hardly works long enough to watch 5 minutes of a video starts they say your house is bad for signal not knowing what my house is made of says signal is great outside so I say no it isn't any good outside either because that's where my box is outside on the window seal just like now at 11.55 am 1/3/23 while typing this the YouTube video I'm watching has stopped and loaded 30 plus times but last night after taking to customer service I was getting 100mbs never lose signal strength it's constantly on good just nothing comes from the box as far as service just have to deal with it another month or so then it should work better once I get down to Miami

[GracieAllen]

This time the local T-Mobile replaced the Sagemcom box with an Arcadian (not sure of the spelling).  It appears to work about the same, but SO FAR, we're not getting the extremely fast 400Mbps speeds OR the extremely SLOW .25 Mbps speeds.  AND, it's on day THREE and it hasn't crashed yet.

 

Yesterday is pretty typical.  Only have buffering a couple times and download speeds are generally at least as good as the ancient DSL.

 

I'm hopeful this thing will continue working.  If it stays up into tomorrow, we'll keep it.  I still don't understand the astronomical variability from second to second, especially in the middle of the night when there should be very few people doing anything heavy, but as long as it stays high enough to keep things usable I'm happy to ignore it.

 

A mechanical question - is this thing prone to overheating?  I had a box with a 12V fan in it blowing up through the bottom of the Sagemcom box 'cause I read in here that keeping it cool would keep it running (turned out to be untrue), but if this thing NEEDS the extra cooling I can use the fan, though it annoys the domestic associate who has ears like a bat and hates fan noise of any kind...

 

[GracieAllen]

Eventually, T-Mobile got whatever was needed with the local towers done.  It STILL fluctuates wildly, but it USUALLY stays at a speed that makes things usable.  At good times it runs quite well.  It's better than the DSL we had. and cheaper.

 

Unfortunately, I guess that makes the best answer is to keep calling T-Mobile when it sucks, go through umpteen "support" people,  generally be a pain in the *ss, and have graphs like the above that show how inconsistent their service is.

 

With a little luck, after 4 - 5 months, hopefully they'll get things to the point where the service doesn't drop to zero, and will mostly work most of the time!  If you're lucky, it'll work well enough you rarely get buffering on the 480p tv, and downloads will be reasonably fast.

[xs1]

15 hours ago, GracieAllen said:

Eventually, T-Mobile got whatever was needed with the local towers done.  It STILL fluctuates wildly, but it USUALLY stays at a speed that makes things usable.  At good times it runs quite well.  It's better than the DSL we had. and cheaper.

 

Unfortunately, I guess that makes the best answer is to keep calling T-Mobile when it sucks, go through umpteen "support" people,  generally be a pain in the *ss, and have graphs like the above that show how inconsistent their service is.

 

With a little luck, after 4 - 5 months, hopefully they'll get things to the point where the service doesn't drop to zero, and will mostly work most of the time!  If you're lucky, it'll work well enough you rarely get buffering on the 480p tv, and downloads will be reasonably fast.

 

At least its (currently) consistent. Much better than satellite alternatives! 

[GracieAllen]

Yeah, but it's not portable.  For years we had Directv with a Winegard automatic dish.  It MOSTLY worked most of the time.  It had some quirks, but we could usually find a spot to put the dish where it would find a satellite and work.  Unfortunately, it was only SD, which was OK in the RV.  Unfortunately, Directv was so miserable to work with it was a VERY happy day I got to express my opinions while telling the "loyalty" manager where he could put his latest price increase. 

 

Now we stream using Visible, which  sort-of works semi-adequately most of the time, but has NEVER been anything to write home about.  Even with the router hack in most places there's MAYBE 1 megabit download.

 

I"m seeing more and more Starlink units on RVs, and that seems like the direction people are going now.