White LTE modem, trashcan review / slow pings and upload speed reductions
I was surprised to get the white square old device 9/26, (but all shiny new). Immediately, I requested an upgrade to the new silver round trashcan device and received it 9/30. I am in an area where 5G has not yet become fully implemented. I'm connected via band B66 to an LTE tower a mile away (closest 5G tower is 30 miles away) Regardless, I hooked it up and was pleasantly surprised with the speeds with LTE. During the early morning hours, I would routinely get 60ms pings. My old ISP would reliably give me 30ms pings so this was the only downside. From the graph below, you can see my up and down speeds before t-moble on 9/25, (3mb down and 1 mb up) then the square LTE device from 9/26 until 9/29. On 9/27 you can see my yellow upload speeds went drastically down. A reboot of the white square LTE modem fixed this and the yellow upload speeds returned to acceptable numbers. On 9/30 I received the trashcan and my yellow upload speeds dropped in half compared with the old white square LTE modem, but my download speeds shown in green are much more stable with the trashcan. I recorded my ping numbers separately with a raspberry pi and have ping data for half a million pings. The following can be observed.
- With the square white LTE device 50% of my pings are 61ms or less with a fastest ping of 41ms
- With the new trashcan 50% of my pings are now 73ms or less with a fastest ping of 50ms.
I have questions,
- Why does the trashcan have worse pings than the old white square LTE modem?
- Is there anything I can do to reduce ping times?
- Why does the old white square LTE device do better on uploads than the trashcan?
Overall, the downsides with t-mobile are slow pings, and lack of stability requiring frequent modem reboots. But for those with 3mb down and 1 mbit up, t-mobile can be a better option.
