My T-Mobile Home Internet Experience: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected
Albuquerque, New Mexico. The land of green chili peppers, 310 days of sunshine, the International Balloon Fiesta and agonizingly slow internet. home internet It’s a two horse race albuquerque Over the years: 21Vianet DSL and Xfinity cable. I spent decades on DSL and looked at my internet speed test Slowly travels to a maximum of 20 megabits per second. Friends using Faster Xfinity were unhappy with the cable company’s customer service, data caps, and prices, so I stubbornly stuck with CenturyLink. One day at the end of 2022, T-Mobile Home Internet The gateway arrives at my home. Then I finally called and canceled CenturyLink.
Why should I switch to T-Mobile Home Internet?
I chose T-Mobile for several reasons. DSL is too slow. My next door neighbor has T-Mobile Home Internet and rave about it. Coincidentally, CenturyLink wanted to charge me $200 to replace my old router with a new one. I said, “No,” and changed it to 5G home internet.
My home internet life has improved in my post-DSL world, but it’s not all roses and happy dances. If you’re looking for the TL;DR, look here: I’m still on T-Mobile Home Internet and will probably stick with it until I can deliver Verizon 5G Home Internet Give it a try, or until fiber finally comes to my block. My experience with 5G home internet varies based on my specific situation, so your experience with the same service may vary. Here are some of the things I like about 5G home internet and what might motivate me to do so Switch to another internet service provider One day.
Here’s Why I Love T-Mobile Home Internet
Before I express my dissatisfaction, I’ll start by praising T-Mobile Home Internet. The service’s best features are its simplicity and ease of use, and it represents an upgrade from outdated DSL.
The price is right
With CenturyLink, I pay $45 per month to get download speeds of up to 20Mbps. With T-Mobile, my monthly bill is $50. This to me is the sweet spot for home internet pricing. I’m willing to pay a little more than CenturyLink to get a higher standard of service, but my bargain-hunting mentality will reject the higher price. I would consider Verizon 5G home internet for the same price, but my address won’t be able to use competitor service.
I expect fiber to arrive one day, but I’ll double check pricing before making the change. The two providers most likely to serve my address are Ezee Fiber ($69 per month) and Vexus Fiber ($40 per month for 500Mbps or $50 per month). Vexus increases the interest rate after the first year. When the time comes I’ll weigh my ingrained frugality against fiber performance.
It’s faster than DSL
This may seem like weak praise, but T-Mobile provides me with much faster speeds than DSL. My best speed test result was a net maximum download speed of 200Mbps, 10 times what I got using DSL. Speeds may vary due to network congestion and placement of gateway devices. I have some complaints about the speed, but we’ll get to that later.
The terms are simple
I don’t like the complexity of broadband plans. I don’t want to calculate equipment rental fees or calculate overage penalties data cap. I especially don’t want to be bundled in contract. I just want home internet and the freedom to try other ISPs. T-Mobile checks the simplicity box. There are no gear fees, data caps or contracts.
This is approved by my mother
My mom lives six blocks from me. She also has CenturyLink DSL. I ran a speed test on her desktop computer and the best she could get was about 12Mbps. This is not a typo. This is the reality for some DSL customers. She pays more than $60 a month and gets frustrated every time she calls to discuss the bill. No problem, Mom. We canceled her DSL and signed her up for T-Mobile. She found a suitable location for the gateway in the front window near the computer. With a strong signal, she could regularly dial down the speed from 100-200Mbps, which was more than enough for her low-key browsing and streaming needs. The only downside is that she gets text messages about school closings from people who have used her gateway phone number before her. This is a minor annoyance, I don’t have the same problem.
The gateway is simple
T-Mobile offers a free gateway device that combines the functions of a modem and a router. I have a silver Nokia gateway that is affectionately known as the “trash can.” The top-mounted display is a bit annoying due to its awkward position, and it gets hot, but it works. T-Mobile now has newer models. My mother had a Sagem device with a front-facing display that resembled a fancier trash can. The latest gateways are sleeker and look like Apple products. I had no problems setting up my Nokia gateway and my mother’s Sagem gateway. We were online within minutes and found the gateway to be stable, with no crashes or other issues to report. The Wi-Fi works well and reaches all corners of our older home at respectable speeds.
Here’s the not-so-good stuff about T-Mobile Home Internet
T-Mobile Home Internet has a lot of advantages, but it’s not my dream broadband service. Here are a few areas where it struggled.
It’s not faster than cable or fiber optics
Xfinity offers cable speeds up to 1,200Mbps at my house. Fiber from Vexus Fiber, Quantum fiber Ezee Fiber is slowly spreading across Albuquerque, but it’s not in my historic neighborhood yet. Fiber optic customers get symmetrical performance speeds, which I’m very envious of. Typical speeds offered by T-Mobile Home Internet are 72-245Mbps, which is much lower than the speeds offered by local cable and fiber ISPs. The good news is that I’m not a gamer (let’s ignore my obsession with the Nintendo Wii), so I only need enough energy to surf and watch live streams. I don’t mind faster downloads and uploads when I move large music, video, and image files.
Strong signals can be elusive
Two lights are better than none?
T-Mobile’s 5G internet service suffers from the same pitfalls as its phone service. Sometimes you are in a place with weak signal. Sometimes, that place is your own home. My neighbor is the first person I know with 5G home internet, and she gets a strong signal on the west side of her house. Next door, the best signal I could get was a fair signal, two out of five within range of the gateway. This meant I missed out on the highest speeds the service could achieve.
Speeds can vary greatly
My T-Mobile Home internet speed is like the weather in Albuquerque. Wait five minutes and it will change. I just did a speed test and it was 16.7Mbps. It’s so slow that it reminds me uncomfortably of my DSL days. After a few minutes, the speed reached 94.6Mbps. Sometimes, my speeds exceed 100Mbps. Typically, I get around 80Mbps. My speed tests were all over the map. Part of this may be that my home’s construction materials are from 1939, and I couldn’t get a good spot for the gateway to get a better signal. My CNET colleague Eli Blumenthal also encountered speed issues when testing the service in 2022. when CNET’s Joe Supan tries out AT&T Internet Airhe also struggled to maintain good speeds, so this issue may be more prevalent with fixed wireless service rather than specific to T-Mobile Home Internet.
The window is in an awkward position
Sometimes getting a strong signal can require a balancing act.
T-Mobile recommend Place your gateway “near a window or on a higher floor or on a bookshelf.” When I had DSL, my router sat on a nice little custom shelf in my home office. It’s unobtrusive and out of the way. In search of a strong signal, my T-Mobile gateway visits every window in my house. It’s now in my living room, the silver “trash can” sitting on the windowsill. I still have solid Wi-Fi coverage around my home, but internet devices in the windows are not my ideal home decor.
Final Thoughts on My T-Mobile Home Internet Experience
Thinking about getting involved with T-Mobile Home Internet? Consider whether this is an upgrade to your current service. This may be a wise move if you are crawling using a DSL. If you need consistent and super-fast speeds, especially for gaming, then consider cable or fiber optic. I’m not a T-Mobile phone customer, but mobile customers can bundle qualifying phone plans to get extra savings on home internet. That might be enough to sway price-conscious shoppers toward 5G internet service.
There is an element of a 5G home internet experiment. You don’t know how it will work until you try it, so take advantage of T-Mobile’s 15-day money-back trial. I don’t love my home internet, but at least I love it, and the relationship is better than the one I had with DSL.
