After publishing a story about me, T-Mobile’s Home Internet Service Is Dying We received many messages from readers with similar experiences because customer service was unable to resolve the issue. They used excuses like “I’m upgrading” to pull customers off their phones, claiming they were filling in their stats.
Although he requested anonymity in print, our source, who provided documents that he actually worked for T-Mobile, said he was with the company for several years before retiring this spring. In his role, he worked in engineering, which he said was the final stage of an escalation of problems with home Internet services. There, he claimed that he was often encouraged to use the description “It’s a tower” so that he could keep the call down to 10 minutes or less, although he often failed to resolve customer issues. increase. According to him, the service representative will be penalized if the call exceeds 600 seconds or if a customer calls him back within a week about the same issue.
In my case, after spending a few minutes on the phone assisting with everything from power cycling to removing and replacing the SIM card, the rep told me they would “do a few things” to fix the problem. has been put on hold. I found out that my local cell tower was being upgraded and would not be able to provide service for 48 hours, at which point I canceled the service. I felt like he was on the phone for nearly 20 minutes trying to make excuses as the company couldn’t really help me.
“Regarding the specific error code you were receiving [All PDN IP Connection Failure], and the lack of response from T-Mobile regarding the details of that error, the answer is pretty simple. They don’t know,” my source told me. Up the chain we went and was wondering how to fix the problem. “
According to our sources, T-Mobile customer service representatives hope that a hard reset of the 5G gateway will fix the problem when a customer calls with a problem. When that doesn’t work, the company often sends out replacement hardware to appease customers, but customers tell me on T-Mobile’s forums and on his Reddit that they still have connectivity issues. Not a surefire way to solve it.
“If that doesn’t fix the problem, they have no idea where to go from there, so at that point you’re usually out of luck,” our source explained. is a ready-made response given when there is no other answer as to what is going on.”
A former employee said if a tower near me was really being upgraded, a representative would let me know right away. This is because you can view a real-time map of the associated service area. So, if there’s a tower outage or upgrade in progress, the support representative presents that information to the customer within her first minute or two of the call.
According to our sources, when he worked at T-Mobile, customer service representatives focused on a performance metric called first call resolution (FSR). If a customer calls with a problem and he calls back within a week to report the same problem, the record of the person the customer first interacted with is tarnished.
Therefore, it’s best for employees to tell customers to wait at least a week for the issue to be resolved so they don’t get a negative review from T-Mobile, he said. When I called the customer, his service representative told him he had to wait 48 hours for the “tower upgrade” to be completed.
Also, our sources tell us that Call Resolution Time (CRT) is another metric to measure customer service representatives. If you can’t hang up the customer within 600 seconds (10 minutes), it will also affect your performance record. This allows the representative to hang up the customer as soon as possible (perhaps by making a false excuse about the service) or cascade the problem to other departments. The last line of defense is apparently the engineering department where he worked before leaving the company.
We reached out to T-Mobile for comment on the source’s accusations that the company’s support representatives are being pressured to keep customers away from their phones (and thus motivated to mislead customers). rice field. However, the returned statement didn’t really address the issue.
We are constantly improving our 5G networks to support services such as home internet. Occasionally, service may be interrupted for a short period of time. Prolonged issues are rare and he usually resolves them within 12 hours, but Home to his internet customers, Award Winning Customer CareHis team for support We recommend that you request it.
Our sources attribute the problems facing T-Mobile Home Internet customers to a lack of foresight regarding the demands and rigors of relying on cellular data for home Internet service.
“Not only did the company take the time to become an industry expert, they also properly analyzed the details of any problems they might encounter before launching headfirst into the home internet world. I didn’t,” he said. He wants to be in the game and offer special perks to offer to his customers, and he wants to be able to say he was the first company to offer a ‘5G Home He Internet on a Nationwide Scale’. was “
Chris wrote about the All PDN IP Connection Failure error message I received and speculated that the company may not have enough capacity in their new towers to support their home internet service.
“I was told it had a lot to do with towers still in the wild that couldn’t handle connectivity for multiple reasons. Sprint towers that needed to be fully integrated and enough connectivity to ensure reliability. There are still older towers that don’t support the .All this upgrade happens with little to no notice, as we believe it’s not necessary if there is a suitable tower nearby as a fallback This is not the case for home Internet users.
It is worth considering that routers connect with different parameters than mobile phones. Mobile phones crawl through networks that seamlessly change from ‘cell’ to ‘cell’ and are covered by any tower. Internet services request connections in a slightly different way. Instead of expecting it to be on the move, it actually expects it to use more bandwidth.
If you have multiple towers nearby, and not all of them are fully compatible with your home Internet service, you may not have enough distance to assign IP addresses. Problems arise when connecting to older Sprint towers, or towers with limited user capacity for whatever reason. The device requests access to her PDN and is denied. An incompatible tower may not be configured for requests from the device. A perfectly good T-Mobile tower may already be at capacity, so devices are queued up waiting for a connection. It may not try indefinitely, so you have to power cycle it. “
When I asked a T-Mobile source about this possibility, they said it could be causing some customers to suddenly lose connectivity.
Another reader, Stanton, told me about his problem. He was also informed of an ongoing tower upgrade and at the same location he had no issues with T-Mobile phone service.
So I got T-Mobile home internet back during the pilot. I ran into the same error as you. I’ve been through their five to six gateways. They insisted he upgrade the tower for over 6 months. My area is only 5g and 5guc towers. My iPhone also has no problem connecting in these areas.
I have been waiting for over 6 months for them to fix this issue. Finally, I said to pause the internet. My problem is that my location doesn’t have access to fancy spectrum or anything like that. Our best landline deals are cable, which claims nearly 200 a month for what T-Mobile offers, or AT&T, which claims the fastest it can offer is 18 mbps.
Gary actually solved his problem after T-Mobile sent out a new upgraded 5G gateway.
I too have a silver CYLINDRICAL gateway that has completely failed. They provided me with a newer version (square black gateway) and my problem was solved. Yes they looked at all possible causes… tower upgrades, reboots, gateway location moves etc.. when they suggested replacing the gateway with a newer version I jumped at it It’s been working fine for 3 months now.
Interestingly, Carl contacted me and said that he had just signed up for T-Mobile Home Internet and had terrible reception at his location. Company Description: This service wasn’t really available in his area and shouldn’t have been sold to him.
Reading the article about my T-Mobile Gateway experience brought up my own terrifying experience as my first T-Mobile phone and home internet experience. Simply put, it never worked perfectly the first time. There were barely two bars. Always with technical support. Three additional units were shipped for ‘trial’ by technical support over a period of 90 days. The problem was, I shouldn’t have been sold to the internet at home. She verified my address and informed me that “the service was not available in my area”. The unit should never have been sold in the first place.
Washdc, a commenter on my previous article, wrote:
This could have been written by me… 10+ hours on the phone with customer service and their “tech team”, 3 different devices, 48 hour tower outage (I’m about a mile from the 2 towers I live far away), and totally inconsistent coverage… I’ll give this inconsistency a few more days and hopefully in 3 weeks the system will “calm down” and come back to fios … goodbye to all savings, hello to internet jobs… fios be proud…
To be fair, not everyone we’ve heard from has issues with T-Mobile. Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Strategies and Insight who tracks 5G, says T-Mobile’s home Internet said to be using it.
“In my experience with the service, it worked about as fast and reliably as my smartphone,” he said.
Sag said he spoke with his T-Mobile contacts.
As the feedback I got indicates. Clearly I’m not the only one who has had serious problems with the T-Mobile Home Internet. However, it is impossible to know the percentage of users who actually had to cancel the service due to unresolved issues. Of course, people online are quicker to point out problems with a product or service than when they have a good experience. People who have had good experiences usually have no reason to speak up.
When the T-Mobile Home Internet service works, it’s great. The 500+ Mbps downloads and 70 Mbps uploads I’ve had in two successful weeks using the service is unbelievable and far superior to what my previous provider, Spectrum, was able to provide. But the potential for unreliable service was enough to scare me and send me back with open arms on the spectrum.
However, for those who have experienced lengthy outages, been given false information by T-Mobile employees, or been sent multiple hardware replacements in vain hoping to fix the problem, Positive potential is not the problem.
