I recently bought a Max Transit Mini and a data plan through a reseller, and I am on their T-Mobile plan. I was initially getting download speeds of about 10 Mbps, but it suddenly dropped to around 125 kbps and is now basically unusable. Web pages take forever to load or never finish loading.
I tried asking for help from the company that sold me the device, but they weren’t very helpful. They thought it must be congestion at the tower, but I tried moving the device to a different area of the city with different/more towers and saw zero improvement.
Next, I tried signing up for an AT&T plan through Cricket, and installed the new SIM card. When using that SIM card, I experienced the exact same thing – extremely slow speeds.
At this point I thought it might be the local WiFi network that was the bottleneck, so I got an Ethernet cable and plugged directly into the router. No improvement.
It’s very strange, because my iPhone (on T-mobile) gets good data speeds, and we have a Skyroam device that is using the AT&T network and getting good speeds. The towers and network seem fine based on these other devices that work well.
I’m wondering if there are some router configuration settings that I need to tweak, or possibly even a bad router. I’ll add some screenshots of my router admin settings below.
Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide.
125 kbps is very suspicious. IT feels like traffic shaping to me. How much data have you used this month - maybe more than your allowance?
If you can try the sim in another thing (smartphone, USB dongle whatever) and see if its also running slow. If you can’t, go and holler at the network operator and ask for answers.
TMobile has a myriad of “plans” as do the other carriers. As @MartinLangmaid suggested, I’d want to have a conversation direct with the carrier to confirm what plan you are on and what your expectations should be. Your comment re iPhone vs Pepwave performance is interesting but the only conclusion one can reasonably derive is that TMO has “coverage” at that location.
Let me provide an illustration. TMO has M2M/IOT plans which are rate limited with unlimited usage. (These are inexpensive [$4-10/mo range].) We use them extensively. For some number of months now the “speed caps” appear to have been removed (or altered) but are now slowly being reimposed. For SIMs which were supposedly limited to 64kb/sec (or 128, or 512, depending on the plan) we were seeing several mb+ download speeds. Carriers tamper with provisioning and QOS all the time. Some folks who found out about this and who became very accustomed to the “deal” are now disappointed. So, I think the next call I’d make is to TMO. (Have your ICCID, IMEI and “telephone number” handy when you call.)
What advantage was/is there to the reseller-based t-mobile? That seem like ‘suspected’ root cause. Since they are not helping you its not worth the spend anyways - get a data-only plan and sim card directly through T-Mobile.
Since they are not helping you its not worth the spend anyways - get a data-only plan and sim card directly through T-Mobile.