Warning, this is a long post
I'm putting this on the forums as quite frankly I'm about 15 minutes from dropping the service and going back to AT&T
A month ago I purchased the Galaxy SII with the Monthly 4g (5Gb) package, it was a wonderful experience to start with, throughput at my home of around 14Mb/s down and 4Mb/s up...better than my DSL speed!, and I had excellent network speeds elswhere in Jefferson City. The VOIP service I was using ran flawlessly from the Galaxy SII ....however this didn't last.
After 2 weeks the speed at my home dropped overnight to middle of the road 3g speeds about 1700kb/s.....I was a bit surprised and acknowledged that occasionally these things happen. On investigation one of the other cell sites a little further from my home was still running at full speed(over 10Mb/s), which lasted about a day, leaving only the site on the west end of town running at approx 5Mb/s wich also lasted a few more days, now coverage is still good, signal strength hasn't been affected in the slightest. I have reported this several times, each time the CSR wants me to diagnose my phone, which I have played along with although I'm almost certain it isn't the handset itself but the local network. I have reflashed the factory firmware and reset the phone with no change.
This problem I have reported 3 times in the last week.....I have been given the standard answer of the engineering team will take up to 72 hours to investigate the issue, one CSR even offered to have the engineering responses e-mailed/texted to my handset, this hasn't happened. I do not have access to another T-Mobile handset to verify, so if any Jefferson City T-Mobile subscribers can verify my findings it will be greatly appreciated.
Hopefully T-Mobile staff will see this question and try to find out what is going on and when it's going to be fixed!
Some information for the engineers....
The tower nearest my home....around 1200yds
FCC Registration Number 1218458
802 Elis Blvd.
Jefferson City, MO 65101
This site had the slowdown on or around the weekend of the 22nd-23rd September
The tower which next had the slowdown was...
FCC Registration Number 1217092
2113 Schothill Woods Drive
Jefferson City, MO 65101
and the last one that experienced the slowdown (as far as I know)
this isn't registered as a T-Mobile tower but ....American Towers, possibly leased.
FCC Registration Number 1281232
3105 S. Ten Mile Drive (#274037)
JEFFERSON CITY, MO
I haven't managed to check elsewhere and I may not bother if this continues.
Now being a network engineer by trade I have a sneaking suspicion that the speeds dropping from one site and being followed over the next few days by the other sites listed indicates to me that something similar to an update was pushed to each site (or an administrative policy) breaking something or restricting the data speed deliberately.
one other clue is no matter where I am in town right now the LAC = 9a4b and CID = 775b4b (do the towers when faced with a problem become a repeater and relay the calls/data to a still functioning central "master" site at a reduced capacity???)
anyhow, thanks in advance
Kevin