Arcadyan KVD21 Gateway 1.00.16

I set up our T-Mobile 5G home Internet last week with the brand new Arcadyan gateway. It was firmware 1.00.12.

The reliability was terrible, we would have to restart it every few hours. We live on a hill in line of sight of the tower about half mile away. Signal is always 4 to 5 bars, excellent, but the gateway would just seem to time out or something and would not let any device connect to the Internet through it. Every time we restarted it it worked perfectly again.
 

My wife was going crazy that we would have to go back to the cable monopoly because it would suddenly go down during zoom calls for work, streaming TV, when the kids woke up every single morning there was no Internet. Yet when we would restart it it would work perfectly a minute later. People talk about the gateways overheating or needing external antennas or what not, but it merely seemed like the gateway needed a refreshed connection to the tower. That is to say, T-Mobile needed to reprogram how the gateways stay connected to the towers.

Yesterday we got firmware update 1.00.16. No new features that I can see but it seems like they did some stability fixes to change how it connects with the tower signals. Because we have been online for 24 hours straight without a single glitch. Fingers crossed that this will hold because we’re in a great location for wireless home Internet and it is much cheaper than the cable monopoly and 2 to 4 times faster.

I suspect it had something to do with switching between bands or switching between 5G and 4G LTE. Maybe something in how devices are prioritized for tower access. Whatever they changed it must be allowing you to connect to a faster band or 5G over 4G or the like. Whatever it is I just want to be able to stay connected. I don’t care if it’s 50 mbps down or the ~100 we usually get or the 250 we occasionally get.