Anyone have T-Mobile home internet ?

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Smokin Okie

Master of the Pit
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Jun 27, 2018
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Oklahoma City
I getting way too many outages with my current provider, Cox Communications. And it appears I can bundle T Mobile home internet with our cell service and cut my internet bill in half.

I'm just not sure about 5G for internet. Afraid of jumping from the frying pan to the fire .

We stream our TV and any buffering is a no go. But its just the wife and I, we rarely have two TV's going at same time, except for college football season when I get three TVs set up.

And we're not gamers.
 
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They pitched this to me as well but I said hard pass. We have T Mobile and the cell signal inside our house isn't great, and we live in a major suburban area close to an arterial corridor. I assume this is because the 5G spectrum operates in a higher frequency, and higher frequencies struggle to penetrate through dense materials (e.g. roofs and walls of buildings!) than lower frequencies.

The further away from an urban/suburban environment you get the worse the 5G coverage is going to be.

For most this isn't a problem, as once you're home or at work you're likely on WiFi anyway. But for me at least, the 5G becoming the WiFi isn't viable.
 
Yes I have been with TMobile home internet for a little under 2 years. Absolutely love it. I had many,many problems with Spectrum/Charter. The never fixed their problem and kept increasing rates.
T Mob is $50/month no major outages. Every once in a long while things will "stick" and have to reboot the gateway. You have to do this with any provider. Make sure you are within their 5G footprint, the closer to a cell site the better.

They will provide a gateway, combination access node/wifi router. This is the only thing I disliked as there is little optioning that can be done on their router (very simplified). But the gateway does have a ethernet jack on it so I"m am to connect it to my other router. I have Wifi access to my barn over 500' away. I put their gateway upstairs and have no problems around the house.
They have a no cost trial if things dont work well.

Here is a screenshot of my wireless speeds over a period of time. With a wireless access gateway you are sharing bandwidth with other customers. So speed varies with usage/loading. This is why being close is an advantage as you would be able to use all of the 5G tricks, MIMO and beam forming.
Give it a try!

RG

speed test.png
 
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I guess it really depends on where you live.In my area Cox has been outstanding as far as reliability goes but the pricing could be better but since my wife has been working out of the house for the past 15+ years her company pays half the cost so for us it's a no-brainer.I know several folks who've tried cell providers for internet and for them it just wasn't reliable but in my region anything cell related has had reliability issues.
 
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I can look out my front door and see a cell tower. Google Maps says its 870 feet away.

I'm gonna go with the free trial period.

I've had Cox broadband for 28 years. Its never been this bad before. Every day this week we get text messages from them telling us there's an outage in our area. We get internet for 15 minutes and then it goes down. Does that all day, off and on and off and on. This follows a weekend last month that was down from Friday night to late Sunday night. I suspect they're doing maintenance , but for some reason don't want to tell us.

I feel some loyalty to Cox. They contacted me two years ago and cut my ISP bill in half, voluntarily. I'm sure they saw it as a pre-emptive move. I've never had any business do anything like that.

But if I can bundle our cell phone with internet, I can cut the bill in half again.
 
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I'm not sure about T-Mobile but I do have Verizon LTE/5G home internet in my barn. The nightmare of switching all my phones (4) over to Verizon was something I'd rather not do again but it dropped my phone/internet bill substantially. As far as the internet I've got 300 Mbs and it solid with no real issues.

Got Vyve cable internet at the house. That's a whole other story but it's been good with no issues for the last 6 months.

I can tell you I recently called to cancel my Vyve internet and I explained to them when I called that I had other options and they dropped my monthly rate substantially for the next year just to keep me.

Wasn't planning to keep the cable internet but it was too cheap not to keep it for now.
 
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I have T-Mobile phone and internet. On the senior plan. Love it. Rarely any issues. I only have one tv going at a time, and my phone. You do have to reboot every once in a while, but that's pretty much standard with any carrier.
 
I tried them twice. Others in our (very large) neighborhood are happy, but didn’t work well at our location.
 
Pretty sure 5G is line of sight so us country folks are left out. We barely have 1 bar on the cell phone, glad we have wifi that our cell phones run through, kicked ma bell to the curb a few years ago after the phone went out for the 2nd time in less than a year. it was out for about a week both times and we got the notice that if the problem was in our house we would have to pay. both times it was at a sub station that nobody works at anymore. I am $75 richer these days and that was not even with long distance, they separated that when they broke up the phone company's years ago.
 
We have the TM home thingy. Works fine for two puters and two TVs. We don't watch much TV anymore because most programs are junk but I do like my Fox News and the wife watches the Hallmark stuff.
Check the TM service map to see if you are within range
 
WE SWITCHED OVER FROM COX TO T=MOBILE SOME TIME BACK, NO COMPLAINTS. NONE OF THIS FLOPPY CHIPS CRAP WORKS PERFECTLY ALL THE TIME THO I STILL KIND OF MISS THE OLD WALL PHONE, A LOT LESS MARKETING CALLS BACK THEN. RAY
 
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Yes I have been with TMobile home internet for a little under 2 years. Absolutely love it. I had many,many problems with Spectrum/Charter. The never fixed their problem and kept increasing rates.
T Mob is $50/month no major outages. Every once in a long while things will "stick" and have to reboot the gateway. You have to do this with any provider. Make sure you are within their 5G footprint, the closer to a cell site the better.

They will provide a gateway, combination access node/wifi router. This is the only thing I disliked as there is little optioning that can be done on their router (very simplified). But the gateway does have a ethernet jack on it so I"m am to connect it to my other router. I have Wifi access to my barn over 500' away. I put their gateway upstairs and have no problems around the house.
They have a no cost trial if things dont work well.

Here is a screenshot of my wireless speeds over a period of time. With a wireless access gateway you are sharing bandwidth with other customers. So speed varies with usage/loading. This is why being close is an advantage as you would be able to use all of the 5G tricks, MIMO and beam forming.
Give it a try!

RG

View attachment 721669

According to Google AI , this is more than enough speed for streaming

For smooth streaming, you generally need at least 5 Mbps for HD streaming and 25 Mbps for 4K streaming. However, the ideal speed depends on the video quality and the number of devices streaming simultaneously.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:
  • SD Streaming (Standard Definition): 3-5 Mbps is usually sufficient.

  • HD Streaming (High Definition): 5 Mbps is the minimum, but 25 Mbps is recommended for a more reliable experience, especially for multiple devices.

  • 4K Streaming (Ultra High Definition): 25 Mbps is the minimum, but 35 Mbps or more is recommended for optimal performance, particularly if multiple devices are streaming.
 
The intermittant outages are starting up again today.
I went through a bad spell a few weeks ago . Spectrum . They keep sending me a message about equipment upgrade , but that's a whole other issue ( apparently I don't have and account )

Just got the bill , and it's 15 bucks higher than it was . I need to look into doing something myself .

Forgot to say , when I switch stuff like this , I let it overlap a month . Just to see if I like the new service , and give me time to figure things out . Cost a month of service , but might save a headache .
 
I have SparkLight.
Originally had 500M for $95/month.
Then they made me and offer I couldn't refuse. 1G for $85/mo.
Well, a couple months ago, they just raised to $91.
 
I went through a bad spell a few weeks ago . Spectrum . They keep sending me a message about equipment upgrade , but that's a whole other issue ( apparently I don't have and account )

Just got the bill , and it's 15 bucks higher than it was . I need to look into doing something myself .

Forgot to say , when I switch stuff like this , I let it overlap a month . Just to see if I like the new service , and give me time to figure things out . Cost a month of service , but might save a headache .

I cancelled my Cox auto pay, that was set for tomorrow. And as soon as I get T-Mobile set up, I will cancel Cox completely. If T-Mobile doesn't work out, but I'm very sure it will, then I go AT&T optic.

and Cox may never get paid for this last month.

Never again.

All week , I've had internet in short periods, off and on, off and on .
 
I've had it for 2 years this month and have has ZERO issues with it.

Granted, as the nearest TM tower is "almost" too far away from my house (I live out in the boonies IN the woods!), I don't get those lightening speeds, but it's still MUCH faster when I had with ATT and my connection is stable/reliable (UN-like with ATT!).

I can't speak to how it performs when gaming (my "gaming" consists of "The Room, parts 1 - 3" which it handles VERY well and Jigidi (jigsaw puzzles), but it more than meets my needs.

I used it for 3 months before I cancelled ATT just to be sure (like I said, in the boonies!)...they didn't even argue with me like they would have in years past.
 
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I went through a bad spell a few weeks ago . Spectrum . They keep sending me a message about equipment upgrade , but that's a whole other issue ( apparently I don't have and account )

Just got the bill , and it's 15 bucks higher than it was . I need to look into doing something myself .
Chop, I procrastinated for years as my email was TWC.com(long time customer) it was and embedded in all my accounts. When they increased prices I decided to change ISPs. I said never again, I pay for an email address now. I got the email and started methodologically moving accounts. About a month in I got the T-Mobile account. A month later I canceled my Spectrum account. Should have done it years ago, no service interruptions, Tmobile is very easy to deal with. No more service calls and timeless waits on hold.
So we stream all of our content. Watch what we want to watch, subscribe to Prime, Paramount, Blaze, share Apple, Peacock and Max with the kids. I do have a very good antenna system so we do use antenna OTA occasionally.

Cox Cable was my first tech job in 1980. All analog cable plant, no internet, my have things changed in the past 45 years.

RG
 
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