The new T-Mobile Home Internet Gateway has slowly been making its way into the public, and it’s not exactly the new hardware everyone was hoping for. The new gateway is lacking a ton of features that even the previous Nokia gateway provided. Specifically, it lacks any official way to see what bands are connected.
There is hope, however, as YouTuber Nater Tater has, along with fellow T-Mobile enthusiast u/highvolt on Reddit, discovered a way to view advanced cell metrics on the new gateway.
The Arcadyan Home Internet Gateway, model KVD21, currently lacks any sort of useful metrics regarding the connection the unit has to the T-Mobile network shown in its UI. Even the dedicated T-Mobile Home Internet app apparently doesn’t show much useful information.
The previous Nokia gateway offers this information freely. Signal strength and quality, signal-to-noise ratio, tower information, and most importantly the connected bands are all freely shown in the connection status page of the built-in firmware.
Now, YouTuber Nater Tater has discovered an API URL that displays the details of the connection in JSON format for the Arcadyan unit. That URL, shown below, shows what bands the gateway is connected to, and can be loaded while connected to an Arcadyan gateway.
http://192.168.12.1/TMI/v1/gateway?get=allSignal information like this can be useful for customers to locate the best signal in their home. More specifically, the cellular bands the unit is connected to will often affect the speeds you receive. A connection to the 5G band “n41”, for example, is T-Mobile’s “Ultra Capacity” mid-band signal which offers the fastest speeds.
The T-Mobile Home Internet enthusiasts have wanted a more open and customizable gateway since the service launched. Along with external antenna connectors, more easily accessible cell metrics and other settings were highly desired. It seems T-Mobile focused on the supply of available units more than the desires of the community with this particular unit. It’s likely the Nokia model was low in stock and the Arcadyan model was simply a way to increase stock for more customers.
Hopefully T-Mobile releases a firmware update in the future to incorporate this data directly into the UI of the gateway. Perhaps the carrier may one day release a new gateway that includes all the features the community wants. For now, though, you’ll have to use this slightly more obscure method.
