Replacement T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia Trash Can modem arrives, dies five minutes after I turn it on, and I had to explain “reboot loop” to the tech support.

T-Mobile says if it won’t work well in your neighborhood, they won’t sell service there.

So today, my replacement Nokia Trash Can Modem arrived for my T-Mobile Home Internet, which has been getting increasingly unreliable.

I took it out of the box, made note of the fact that there was no power cord and no SIM card in it, and proceeded to put the SIM card from the old unit into the new one. The replacement Trash Can’s sticker says it is “hardware revision 2”, whereas the one that I have that was being replaced was “hardware revision 3”.

When I powered it on, it let me connect over WiFi for about 5 minutes and all seemed good until it dropped the WiFi connection and went into an endless reboot loop.

When I called to complain, T-Mobile’s Home Internet tech support didn’t know what a “boot loop” was, so I had to describe what I meant.

They asked me to hold in the hardware reset button, which I did, to no effect.

When I asked them what to do, they said put the SIM card back in the first Trash Can so I could use that. You know, the one that’s been dropping off their network several times a day and causing a chain of events where nordvpnd gets confused and turning off the killswitch at that point does not erase the firewall rules until I either reboot or clear them with the iptables utility.

Then when I expressed my exasperation at all of this fuss just to try to get some minimum level of internet service that I could depend on, and asked if I should just cancel my T-Mobile accounts and go back to Comcast, they said “Oh, you could do that.”. Then when I asked for a return label for the modem that just outright died on me, they sent me a return label and packing slip for both units.

Then I had to call them again to get that sorted when I noticed.

Along the way, I talked to a guy in their “engineering” department who said he would dispatch some people to work on the local tower, because my problem was never the modem.

According to this person, their tower is just overloaded because they’ve been selling more Home Internet accounts than it can really handle, and so your Internet speed can be anywhere from 2 Mbps to 80 Mbps or not working at all, and it just depends.

He promised that within a few days I should notice speeds of 100-200 Mbps. If I don’t, I’m just going back to Comcast. This is beyond nuts. T-Mobile is so incompetent and I hate this company.

I was a cell phone subscriber with Sprint all the way back to 2002 and I never had anything like this going on where they killed my 10 month old phone with a new SIM card and then sold me a Home Internet package that barely works.

Don’t switch to T-Mobile Home Internet if Comcast works at all. You’ll be sorry.