Sagemcom FAST 5688W vs Nokia 5G21 T-Mobile Home Internet

[mmmmna]

Apologies if there is a better location to post this.

Over a year with the Nokia 5G21 set up in a suburban area near Worcester Massachusetts.

The Nokia would actually restart (according to the LCD screen) whenever it got a little too warm. Yeah not the best signal, so I'm guessing it was struggling with tx power. Was. I no longer have that device.

The local T-Mo store said that the Nokia 5G21's were 'prone to overheating, the new Sagemcom (FAST 5688W) should fix that'.

Nope. I switched to the Sagemcom, and I really don't see ANY improvement over the Nokia. The new gateway still goes dead periodically, about as often as the Nokia rebooted. And the signal metrics seem to be the same as the Nokia, so yep, no resolution of the 'reboots'. At least the Sagemcom gets through it in maybe 5 seconds as opposed to the 30 or so second reboots of the Nokia.

But, now comes a new difficulty: the Sagemcom can only be accessed via an Android device which uses the Sagemcom's provided WiFi service. The IP address for the admin login (shown on the back of the device) gives me about nothing when I access it in a browser, nothing useful aside from telling me to go download the Android app. Which app, in turn, is all but useless.

I have an older Android tablet which USED to run at a decent speed. Not on the Sagemcom. I hadn't rebooted that tablet until hours into the struggle with the Sagemcom. I'd like to investigate a slowdown, but no tools are provided in the Android app.

Nowhere in the official consumer setup pathways do I get DNS settings, no way to shut down 2.4 GHz WiFi if I wanted to troubleshoot connectivity issues, no way to force certain internal addresses to NOT be throttled 24/7...

Also of interest: The Sagemcom I was given was a resealed box (the seal label was a second seal label placed over a torn first label), with an added green sticker added on top of the box. Which means refurbished (and I told the employee it was a refurb, he pretended to not know this). So, it seems this device was returned for some reason.... likely because the same 'reboot' problem remained uncorrected for the prior user of this exact device.

Ulltimately, I know the slowed tablet was much faster with the Nokia earlier in the day when I switched gateways, and there is no way to reset the Sagemcom to allow it to have faster access. In other words, update that tablet or else?

Unless someone knows a solution, I apologize that at first glance, this appears to be just a rant. Really just trying to get to the bottom of the 'you can't get there from here (because we burned that bridge before your arrival)'.

Ugh.

[mmmmna]

NB: It appears T-Mobile pushed a firmware update in Feb 2023 and bricked 34k of these gateways. Which firmware version? The same version I have.

https://tmo.report/2023/02/bad-firmw...ternet-modems/

<sarcasm>T-Mobile: What you trying to prove by locking admin so tightly? </sarcasm>