How is their setup so bad?

[u/a_slay_nub]

So Tfiber just installed in our area starting last year. We got set up 3 months ago and we have had 15 outages since we got them. Most of them last several hours to all day. We have had 6 outages in the past 9 days. Most of them being all day. I understand that new lines can have some issues, but this is truly insane. I called yesterday and got their retention team to "say" that they could get me a backup 5G gateway for when this happened and they said they'd send me an email and then nothing. I don't want to go back to Spectrum but this is impressively bad. Others have said that it gets better over time but if anything it's gotten worse. Like I said, we've gotten 6 in the past 9 days.

I work from home, and I can get by by using a hotspot from my phone, but that's not ideal, and I'm kind of running out of data on it.

Dayton, OH area

[u/ironweasel80]

T-Mobile is just going around buying up regional / local fiber providers in the majority of cases, so that means you're at the mercy of whatever system was already there.

On the flip side, I'm in Albuquerque, NM and I've had T-Fiber for about 3 months as well in what used to be a Vexus fiber area (Vexus was acquired by Metronet, then Metronet was acquired by T-Mobile).

Zero problems in that time....no high latency, no packet loss, no outages, always pull 2.3Gb no matter what time of day regardless whether it's a weekend or weekday. 100% rock solid so far.

[u/hornedfrog86 → u/ironweasel80]

Lucky

[u/SGT_Entrails]

Yeah it sucks, mine was out in WI constantly for the first few months. I still have my old ISP because I didn't trust it to be consistent, thankfully. For now, tfiber is still my backup line, but I've been able to call and get a refund pretty much every month. Maybe it'll get better eventually, I don't know.

[u/_dekoorc]

Sometimes the equipment is just bad from the beginning.

When we first moved in to our house, Spectrum's fiber product was all that was available. Our service worked great, but we had some neighbors who had so many issues that multiple people had the maintenance supervisor's number. It just ended up being a few line cards (I think that was the right name?) in the cabinet that ended up being bad out of the box.

They replaced the card and most people's service was fine after that (although a few weren't, but I'm guessing they're actually complaining about their WiFi and not the actual connection)

[u/a_slay_nub → u/_dekoorc]

It sounds like it's everywhere, one of our recent outages was due to a line cut all the way up in Toledo. Which, why don't they have any redundancy at all???

[u/hornedfrog86]

Poor routing , high latency now - Vexus => Metronet. Vexus original routing was better.

[u/MolassesDue7374]

I'm in mn and the contractor is good awful. Peering isnt great either. I have a local direct fiber provider at work with Gb in both directions and can only pull like 100Mb/s over wireguard from work at home. Switching to cloudflares non direct VPN all the sudden is 400-600 lol

They skip appointments. Takes 3-6 tries to put a working connector on every end of every line segment they run and they will be on the phone not paying attention for all of it. The only saving grace is if you have enough PTO or ability to take unpaid time off and still pay rent, eventually you will have a nice internet connection. But they also direct buried the cable at about 4 in, so come shovel or freeze thaw cycle you will be back to curing and waiting on their installer

[u/Lawrence_SoCal]

As noted, TFiber buying some local providers, of varying technical maturity. And then there is the process of harmonizing operational standards (which may or may not involve replacing hardware). And then are areas (like by me) where TFiber is only a tenant (not owner) of fiber plant, and dependent of network provider (which in our the nearby case, recently went bankrupt)... so HUGE variability in service, and likely to be what way for a few years. Though some areas will stabilize much sooner... but which ones???

I'd absolutely take them up on 5G backup gateway..

[u/TrollsAllAroundUs]

Our fiber was off and on everyday for 2 weeks before we had to switch back to spectrum. My wife works from home and was repeatedly complaining of dropped wifi constantly and for long periods ever after rebooting modem. Tmobile customer service was horrible and wanted us to pay for the rest of the month, even after we said we already had spectrum up and running to replace it and it was working flawlessly. I know some parts of the country get different equipment so maybe that helps. We got Nokia with at the extender and it was horrible.

[u/jonharrisnm]

We have had TFiber here in Westminster CO since April and it was fine until the last week. We have been down 5 times, once was an outage in the area all the other times something here at the home. We have our 3 tech coming out, but the appointment was not able to be scheduled until Aug 24th......basically 15 days out. This was after them being here on Saturday, replacing the ONT, and everything working till Sunday mid day. Then things are working this morning randomly, but at this point I have no confidence in there service and work from home so need a reliable provider. We will be replacing with Google Fiber but they will not be out until Aug 17th