T-Mobile 5G Internet-How reliable is it?

Golden sunsets

Golden sunsets

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
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So....... we live in a market with no other realistic internet option than Spectrum, which at $74.99/mo unbundled for 100 mbps, but is very reliable. No AT&T Uverse, no google fiber, nada alternatives.

Now along comes T-Mobile 5G internet for $50/mo. So who has signed up? How good is it? How fast is it? I assume it's wireless, coming from a cell tower and not through a wired fiber connection. Right? So I'm skeptical to say the least, but open to something other than Spectrum if it's reliable?

Oh and do you have to be a T mobile wireless subscriber to sign up for their internet? And is there a modem in your home with their service?
 
Golden sunsets said:
So....... we live in a market with no other realistic internet option than Spectrum, which at $74.99/mo unbundled for 100 mbps, but is very reliable. No AT&T Uverse, no google fiber, nada alternatives.

Now along comes T-Mobile 5G internet for $50/mo. So who has signed up? How good is it? How fast is it? I assume it's wireless, coming from a cell tower and not through a wired fiber connection. Right? So I'm skeptical to say the least, but open to something other than Spectrum if it's reliable?

Oh and do you have to be a T mobile wireless subscriber to sign up for their internet? And is there a modem in your home with their service?
Click to expand...
We have had T-Mobile Internet for more than a year but it is not 5G. I expect they will be upgrading to that at some point. The LTE version works well for our purposes. We have what must be the worst cable company in the world - Suddenlink - and their service was completely unreliable. DSL is available but, with old infrastructure, it is slow.

So we had the opportunity to participate in T-Mobile Internet pilot program and did so. It's been great! $50/month including taxes and fees. Our speed varies between 30-50 Mb/s and has been very reliable. Yes, it's a modem that gets signal from a cell tower. No wires. Maybe once a month I might have to reboot the modem which provides good WiFi coverage in our multilevel home. One of our PC's is wired to it but there are only two LAN connections. We have a good router that we used with cable but it hasn't been needed with T-Mobile. Although we were existing Tmobile customers, I don't think that's required. If you have a friend with a TMobile cell phone you might want to see what their TMobile signal is like at your location.
 
Ian S said:
We have had T-Mobile Internet for more than a year but it is not 5G. I expect they will be upgrading to that at some point. The LTE version works well for our purposes. We have what must be the worst cable company in the world - Suddenlink - and their service was completely unreliable. DSL is available but, with old infrastructure, it is slow.

So we had the opportunity to participate in T-Mobile Internet pilot program and did so. It's been great! $50/month including taxes and fees. Our speed varies between 30-50 Mb/s and has been very reliable. Yes, it's a modem that gets signal from a cell tower. No wires. Maybe once a month I might have to reboot the modem which provides good WiFi coverage in our multilevel home. One of our PC's is wired to it but there are only two LAN connections. We have a good router that we used with cable but it hasn't been needed with T-Mobile. Although we were existing Tmobile customers, I don't think that's required. If you have a friend with a TMobile cell phone you might want to see what their TMobile signal is like at your location.
Click to expand...

My situation is the same. Download speed varies, time of day. Upload speed faster than my previous Xfinity/Comcast plan. After years with Xfinity, got
fed up with their yearly price changes. I only need internet.

T-mobile, provides, combo modem/router, free. I hooked up the t-mobile
combo/router to my existing router. Appears to increase the "range".

No contract. Which is nice. You can always cancel. There are a couple of
you-tube videos which are quite informative.
 
For those that might be interested, below is a link to the T Mobile internet service page. If you scroll down and click on the "check availability" link, it will show if coverage is available in your area.

https://www.t-mobile.com/isp


We are covered and considering this.
 
I haven't tried T-Mobile but did use Sprint for my Internet for awhile. Finding the best location inside the house to obtain the strongest signal is important, co-locating it with your current network equipment may not give you the strongest signal. I placed my modem next to a window that had the best LOS to the cell towers.
 
Very slow during evening hours - we often can't watch Netflix etc in the evenings.
 
I got the offer over a year ago and gave it a try (it was the previous model, just LTE). They sent me the modem and I hooked it up. But I got a lousy signal even though I can see the nearest T-Mobile antenna out my window. It's a direct line, less than a quarter of a mile away.

Spent half an hour on the phone with one of their technicians before he pronounced himself stumped.

"I can see where you are, and the antenna is right there!"

"Yep."

It turns out that their antenna is somewhat directional and faces the other way. So even though it probably would have been a good idea, I had to send the modem back and say "No thanks."
 
qwerty3656 said:
Very slow during evening hours - we often can't watch Netflix etc in the evenings.
Click to expand...
Guess it depends where you are. We've never experienced this. Have you tried the Speedtest app on a computer on a wired LAN connection to your T-Mobile modem?
 
We also have Spectrum at $74.99 per month (total) for high speed internet. We average about 430 Mbit/sec download speed with no data caps. The primary issue with switching to a mobile provider is the data cap they impose. We use about 800 to 1100 gigabytes of downloads per month (mostly from streaming 4K HDR video). AT&T also services the area but has data caps on their plans and it would be significantly more per month given our utilization.
 
Freedom56 said:
We also have Spectrum at $74.99 per month (total) for high speed internet. We average about 430 Mbit/sec download speed with no data caps. The primary issue with switching to a mobile provider is the data cap they impose. We use about 800 to 1100 gigabytes of downloads per month (mostly from streaming 4K HDR video). AT&T also services the area but has data caps on their plans and it would be significantly more per month given our utilization.
Click to expand...
TMobile claims they have no data caps on their internet service. I certainly haven't noticed any and I'm pretty sure we use hundreds of GB a month - maybe not as many as you do.
 
Freedom56 said:
We also have Spectrum at $74.99 per month (total) for high speed internet. We average about 430 Mbit/sec download speed with no data caps. The primary issue with switching to a mobile provider is the data cap they impose. We use about 800 to 1100 gigabytes of downloads per month (mostly from streaming 4K HDR video). AT&T also services the area but has data caps on their plans and it would be significantly more per month given our utilization.
Click to expand...
Freedom; How do you find out how much data you use per month?
 
It just seems to me that with virtually 100% of homes needing access to the internet, that there would be room for at least 2 sources of good service for each to still make a profit. I don't consider DSL as a contender. I guess the barriers to entry for fiber are very high.
 
Ian S said:
TMobile claims they have no data caps on their internet service. I certainly haven't noticed any and I'm pretty sure we use hundreds of GB a month - maybe not as many as you do.
Click to expand...

At 40 mb/sec my days of streaming 4K HDR will end quickly. We have T-mobile for our phones. They cap the 4G LTE data at 2 GB then shift you to slower speed after that.
 
Golden sunsets said:
It just seems to me that with virtually 100% of homes needing access to the internet, that there would be room for at least 2 sources of good service for each to still make a profit. I don't consider DSL as a contender. I guess the barriers to entry for fiber are very high.
Click to expand...

It depends on where you live whether DSL will be satisfactory. I've had it for the past year and it works good for me, it's been very reliable and no problems streaming, including 4K.
 
Freedom56 said:
At 40 mb/sec my days of streaming 4K HDR will end quickly. We have T-mobile for our phones. They cap the 4G LTE data at 2 GB then shift you to slower speed after that.
Click to expand...
I can confirm no caps on their internet service; we typically use just under 500 GB of high speed data on that line. This evening I ran Speedtest and got 42 Mbps. Earlier today, it was 72 Mbps. Eventually, they plan to go with 5G so that should be much faster but they will probably charge more for it. Meanwhile, where we live there is no other reliable broadband. The cable company has coasted on their ancient infrastructure but may have finally figured out that they needed to do something and I see new cable going in here and there. We literally went for weeks with no cable internet service and so were glad to get into the TMobile plan. Maybe we'll go back to cable at some point but it would to prove its reliability first.
 
Golden sunsets said:
It just seems to me that with virtually 100% of homes needing access to the internet, that there would be room for at least 2 sources of good service for each to still make a profit. I don't consider DSL as a contender. I guess the barriers to entry for fiber are very high.
Click to expand...

We are moving to our country home today and broadband availability is very hard. We get satellite with 100GB soft data cap right now. We are also in the process of hosting a "fixed wireless" ISP tower on our property which has 2T soft data cap. We still need couple of more options since fixed wirelesss provider has mixed reviews. Low orbit satellite and 5G home internet can fill the void here. Populated areas should have a lot many more options going forward.
 
I think that a 5g based home internet is an interesting option. I now have a 5g phone (Galaxy S21 5g) on T-Mobile's network, and have just started doing a little experimentation.



I had read that low- and mid-band 5g has good building penetration characteristics, but I'm finding that's not the case. At my house I can be just inside my front door and fail to get 5g --- and speedtest run on the phone gets me maybe 5 mbps download at that point tops. Then I open the door and step out on the porch and I'm getting 5g low-band (band n71 via T-Mobile's network) and I get something on the order of 30 Mbps download.



It's not just that particular location in the house. There's exactly one spot right next to an upstairs window where I can get 5g and appropriate confirming download speed in the house. Oddly enough, everything that I read and one app I downloaded all tell me that the cell tower I'm communicating is due north of me, while that spot in the house is at the SW corner. Go figure.


What I can say is that even with low band, I'm seeing much faster speeds with 5g, a greater disparity over 4g LTE than I had expected from doing a lot of reading. But the poor building penetration would make me leery of using this for home internet, at least at the two locations I've tried, unless I could get a good rebroadcast antenna solution for bands n71 and (optimistically --- maybe --- mid-band n41). I would expect that these would add to lag and jitter though, but ... who knows. At this point I'm much more interested in empirical data, as the theoretical seems to be off!


The "other" place I tested a bit is a cabin in the woods. Just outside the metal-sided cabin I get 5g. In one window in the structure my phone will sometimes show the 5g icon, but when I do a speedtest, it always seems to sort of pause and then say, "whoops, I guess it's just 4g after all". It's wonderful that the range of low-band 5g gets signal out to there, however. I am kind of interested in the cell-anntenna-on-house approach there too, but from looking around I think it might be premature (?).


Thanks for the posts on this topic thus far; I hope there are more, and the more details the better.
 
Interesting Speedtest results using my TMobile phone (Galaxy S8+). Using the phone data (LTE) i.e. not connected to the Internet modem I get 25.6 Mbps down and 5.6 Mbps up. Using Wifi to connect through the TMobile Internet modem (also LTE), I get 55.6 Mbps down and 22.1 Mbps up.
 
I currently use a hotspot under an "unlimited 4G" plan (grandfathered) with another carrier & it's fine for me alone or for travel/backup...but with multiple people in my household I also subscribe to cable broadband.
 
Ian S said:
Guess it depends where you are. We've never experienced this. Have you tried the Speedtest app on a computer on a wired LAN connection to your T-Mobile modem?
Click to expand...

Yes - I have made dozens of calls to Tmobile tech support (literally 2 hours on hold). During the day I get 50+ Mbps download speeds. At night, it often drops below 1 Mbps. The problem is they treat Internet users the same way they treat "Heavy" Data cell phone users which is last in the queue. So anytime there is congestion, you drop to the bottom. This is right out of their terms of service:

"The vast majority of customers on T-Mobile-branded, Sprint-branded, Metro by T-Mobile-branded, and Assurance Wireless-branded plans receive higher priority than the small fraction of customers who are Heavy Data Users on their rate plan, who are prioritized last on the network after exceeding the relevant threshold for the current billing cycle. T-Mobile Home Internet (available in select locations) customers receive the same network prioritization as Heavy Data Users, but should be less likely to experience congestion because the equipment is stationary and available in limited areas."

"Heavy Data Users (as defined by a customer’s rate plan) will have their data usage prioritized below the data usage (including tethering) of other customers at times and at locations where there are competing customer demands for network resources, which may result in slower data speeds"
 
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