My Experience with Home Internet on T-Mobile: The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected

(Albuquerque, New Mexico). Home of green peppers, 310 days of sunshine, the International Balloon Festival, and extremely slow internet. Home Internet There was a race between two horses Albuquerque For years: CenturyLink DSL and Xfinity cable. I’ve spent decades on DSL, watching my channels Internet speed tests Go slowly until you reach a maximum of 20 Mbps. Friends with the faster Xfinity bemoaned the cable company’s customer service, data caps, and prices, so I stuck tight to CenturyLink. One day in late 2022, A.J T-Mobile home internet The portal has arrived at my house. After that, I finally called to cancel CenturyLink.

Why did you switch to T-Mobile Home Internet?

I went with T-Mobile for several reasons. DSL was very slow. My neighbor got T-Mobile Home Internet and loved it. Coincidentally, CenturyLink wanted to charge me $200 to replace my old router with a newer one. I said: No, and changed it to 5G home internet.

My online life at home has improved in the post-DSL world, but it’s not all roses and happy dances. If you’re looking for a TL;DR, here you go: I’m still using T-Mobile Home Internet and will probably stick with it until I can deliver Verizon 5G Home Internet Trying or until the fibers finally appear on my block. My experience with 5G home internet is tailored to my circumstances, so your journey with the same service may be different. Here are the things I love about my 5G home internet and the elements that might push me against it Switch to another ISP someday.

Here’s what I love about T-Mobile Home Internet

I’ll sing the praises of T-Mobile Home Internet before I air my complaints. The best features of the service are its simplicity, ease of use, and represent an upgrade over the old DSL.

The price is right

With CenturyLink, I was paying $45 a month for 20Mbps downloads. With T-Mobile, my monthly bill is $50. This is a great point for me regarding home internet pricing. I was willing to pay a little more than CenturyLink for a higher level of service, but my deal-hunting mentality would reject anything higher. I would consider Verizon 5G Home Internet for the same price, but competing service is not available at my address.

I expect fiber to arrive one day, but I will check the prices before making any changes. The two providers most likely to serve my address are Ezee Fiber ($69 per month for Party) and Vexus Fiber ($40 per month for 500Mbps or $50 per month for Party). Vexus raises interest rates after the first year. I will balance my inherent economy with fiber performance when the time comes.

It is faster than DSL

This may seem like faint praise, but T-Mobile gives me much better speeds than I was getting from DSL. My best speed test results were a top download speed of 200Mbps, which is 10 times what I got on a good day with DSL. Speeds can be variable thanks to network congestion and gateway device placement. I have some complaints about the speed, but we’ll talk about that later.

The conditions are simple

I don’t like complexity when it comes to broadband plans. I don’t want to calculate equipment rental fees or know about excessive penalties for overstaying Data cap. I don’t particularly want to be like that tied to a contract. I just want home internet and be free to try another ISP. T-Mobile checks the simplicity box. There are no hardware fees, data caps, or contracts.

It’s approved by my mom

My mother lives six blocks from me. It also had CenturyLink DSL. She 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 was paying more than $60 a month and was frustrated every time she tried to call to discuss her bill. No problem, mom. We canceled her DSL service and signed up for T-Mobile. She found a nice place for the portal in the front window near her computer. With a strong signal, it can regularly drop speeds from 100 to 200 Mbps, which is very good for simple browsing and streaming needs. The only downside is that she receives text messages about the school closing to her portal, a holdover from those who used her portal phone number before her. It’s a minor annoyance, and I don’t have the same problem.

Gates are easy

T-Mobile offers a free gateway device that combines the features of a modem and a router. I have a silver Nokia gateway that is semi-affectionately referred to as “the trash can”. The top mounted screen is a minor annoyance due to its awkward location and gets hot but it works. T-Mobile now has newer models. My mother has a Sagemcom with a front-mounted screen that resembles a more refined trash can. The newer Gateway is sleeker and looks like an Apple product. I had no problems setting up my Nokia gateway and my mother’s Sagemcom. We were online within minutes and found the portals stable, with no crashes or other hiccups to report. Wi-Fi works well, reaching the corners of our older homes at respectable speeds.

Here are the not-so-good things about T-Mobile Home Internet

T-Mobile Home Internet has a lot of benefits, but it’s not my dream broadband service. Here are some of the areas where it stumbles.

It’s not faster than cable or fiber

Xfinity offers cable speeds of up to 1200Mbps in my home. Fiber from Vexus Fiber, Quantum fiber The Ezee Fiber network is slowly spreading across Albuquerque, but it hasn’t reached my historic neighborhood yet. Fiber customers have access to identical party speeds, which I greatly envy. T-Mobile Home Internet offers typical speeds of 72 to 245 Mbps, which is significantly lower than offerings from local cable and fiber Internet providers. The good news is that I’m not a gamer (let’s ignore my Nintendo Wii obsession), so I just need enough oomph for browsing and streaming. I don’t mind the faster downloads and uploads when I’m transferring large music, video, and photo files.

Strong signals may be elusive

T-Mobile’s 5G Internet service is subject to the same risks as phone service. Sometimes, you are in a place with a weak signal. Sometimes, that place is your home. My neighbor, the first person I know to join 5G home internet, is getting a strong signal from the west side of her house. Next door, the best I can get is a fair signal, which comes out to two bars out of five on the gate scale. This means that I miss the maximum speeds that the service can provide.

Speeds can vary greatly

T-Mobile Home’s internet speed is similar to Albuquerque’s weather. Wait five minutes and it will change I just ran an internet speed test and got 16.7 Mbps. That’s slow enough to give me unwelcome callbacks to my DSL service days. After a few minutes it reached 94.6Mbps. Sometimes my speed reaches over 100Mbps. Normally, I’m sitting around 80 Mbps. My speed tests are all over the map. Some of this may be due to the 1939 building materials in my house and my inability to connect in a good location to 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 Subban tried AT&T Internet Airit also struggled to maintain adequate speeds, so the problem may be more endemic to fixed wireless service than that of T-Mobile Home Internet.

Window placement is awkward

T-Mobile recommend Place your gate “near a window, on the loft, or on a bookshelf.” When I got DSL service, my router was sitting in my home office on a small dedicated rack. It was unobtrusive and out of the way. My T-Mobile gateway visited every window in my house as I searched for a strong signal. It’s now in my living room with the silver “trash can” sitting on the windowsill. I still get strong Wi-Fi coverage throughout my house, but a piece of internet equipment sitting in my window isn’t my ideal home decor.

Final thoughts on my experience with T-Mobile Home Internet

Are you thinking about dipping your toes into T-Mobile Home Internet? Consider whether this is an upgrade to your current service. If you’re crawling with DSL, this could be a smart move. If you need consistent, blazing-fast speeds, especially for gaming, look for cable or fiber. I’m not a T-Mobile phone customer, but mobile phone users can bundle qualifying phone plans to get additional savings on home internet. That could be enough to direct price-conscious shoppers to 5G internet service.

There is an element of experimentation with 5G home internet. You don’t know how well it will work for you 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 do, and this is a better relationship than I have with DSL.