Hands-On Experience With T-Mobile Home Internet: An Early Adopter's Take on How It Compares With Cable - CNET

Nov 02, 2024

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He ditched Comcast in favor of an affordable, 5G-powered alternative. Was it the right decision?

T-Mobile's Home Internet gateway serves as a modem and router, but you can also plug in an existing router or mesh network.

Editors' note, September 2024: This article was written in early 2021 when T-Mobile first unveiled its 5G home internet product and updated six weeks later with additional impressions. We've updated it to reflect current pricing and speeds where noted (with accompanying editors' notes), but the original hands-on article is presented below. Otherwise, it remains largely unchanged. Check out our 2024 T-Mobile Home Internet review for our latest opinions on this service.

It was early in 2021 when I started testing T-Mobile Home Internet. It was part of a pilot program that hadn't fully rolled out yet and was priced at $50 monthly -- an exciting price point for a then-new player in the home internet space. (Editor's note: The price has bounced around a bit, at some points hitting $60.)

In the interim, I canceled my Comcast Xfinity internet service, which had been billed at $106. Did I make the right call? Did I encounter any major problems? What was the overall experience and would I recommend it to others?

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Here's everything you need to know about the service, including what I learned during my first several weeks.

I was overjoyed when I learned this was available in my area. (Although limited initially, T-Mobile Home Internet is now available to over 40 million US residents, including a third in rural areas.) I'd been with Comcast for years, angrily watching my bill tick up and up and up. My only other broadband option was AT&T, but there's some bad blood there. That was not going to happen.

Locating local internet providers

T-Mobile's deal sounded almost too good to be true: unlimited high-speed service for a flat $50 -- equipment, taxes and fees included. The promise of "no rate hikes" has also proven true after a fashion: I'm grandfathered in at that $50 rate.

I had concerns. Would it be fast enough for everyday computing? Could it handle 4K streaming video? Would it work with my mesh network and support the many connected devices in my house? Perhaps most importantly, was it truly unlimited, or would T-Mobile throttle data at a certain point?

Thankfully, there's no contract required to sign up for service, so I was able to get answers to these questions without risk. It's also a new bargaining chip, a way to potentially negotiate a lower rate from other ISPs. That's something worth considering if T-Mobile Home Internet is available in your area, but you're not necessarily looking to make a change.

Read more: The best internet providers for 2024: Cable vs. Fiber vs. satellite and more

After using T-Mobile's online tool to check availability, I agreed to let a customer service representative call me, and that call arrived about a minute later. I spent just over 10 minutes on the phone with a pleasant operator who answered my questions, approved my credit and told me modem delivery would likely take two to three weeks due to a backorder. My total up-front cost was $0.

Sure enough, it took about three weeks to get the Nokia-made T-Mobile Home Internet Gateway; a silver, cylindrical tower that's both modem and router. It creates 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks in your home, although it also has a pair of Ethernet ports should you wish to connect a mesh router, for example.

Read more: The best mesh routers for 2024

The T-Mobile Home Internet app guides you through the setup process, which includes scanning a QR code on the bottom of the gateway, choosing a network name (aka SSID) and password and even changing the administrator password if you're so inclined; all pretty standard router-setup stuff, all pretty straightforward.

Previously, I used my own cable modem (connected to Comcast) and an Eero mesh router. For the first days of testing, I left the latter out of the equation, as I wanted to see how the gateway performed on its own.

After the initial setup, everything seemed to be working. Having successfully connected my phone, my next stop was my Asus laptop. Curiously, the T-Mobile gateway didn't appear in the list of available networks. Suspecting a Windows hiccup, I rebooted with the same result. Then I pulled out an Amazon Fire tablet; it found the network just fine. So did an upstairs Roku TV and an old basement laptop running Windows 7. Huh.

In the Home Internet app, there's a Support tab with a link to a T-Mobile FAQ page, but that just took me to T-Mobile's home page, which added to my frustration. A link to the T-Mobile Community Forum stonewalled me as well because I didn't have a working T-Mobile sign-in (which didn't arrive via email until two days after I received and set up the gateway).

Read more: T-Mobile announces the widespread launch of consumer Home Internet service

Then I tried restarting the gateway, which proved a huge mistake: It seemed to lose all my previous setup settings, as though I'd done a hard reset. (This is despite it having a battery backup; more on that later.) The app forced me to repeat the entire setup process, including choosing passwords. When I tried using the same ones as the first time, it wouldn't accept them. When I tweaked them slightly, I got a cryptic "installation failed" message.

Eventually, everything seemed to sort itself out, and once I plugged my Eero base station into the gateway, my laptop had no trouble connecting. (For the record, the issue was an outdated Wi-Fi driver. Once I tracked down and installed a newer one, the laptop found the gateway.) Now I was ready for full-bore, whole-house testing.

Here's the good news: After six weeks of business as usual -- working online during the day, streaming video at night, FaceTime calls to parents and so on -- I encountered scarcely a blip in connectivity. While I conducted many speed tests (see below), I mostly wanted to see if I'd notice a difference between T-Mobile's internet service and Xfinity's. Because in the end, what matters is, can I reliably access the internet?

So far, so good. I'd even say very good.

There are definitely some caveats to consider, starting with this: Although T-Mobile's marketing campaign trumpets this as a 5G home internet service, there wasn't mention of 5G anywhere on the T-Mobile Home Internet signup page. (Editors' note: The current version of the signup page clearly includes a 5G callout now.) I mention that because, six weeks in, I still have no idea if I'm getting 5G or not.

The gateway supports 5G where available but downshifts to 4G LTE where not. According to T-Mobile's coverage map, I should have 5G at my house. Nowhere -- not on the web admin page, not on the T-Mobile Home Internet page, not on the gateway's status screen -- is there anything indicating "5G." (Or, for that matter, 4G LTE.)

Does it matter? Not really, as long as I'm getting good performance. Which I am. I just wish there was some at-a-glance way to know if I'm getting the 5G I was promised. Certainly, the test numbers don't tell the whole story:

Over six weeks, T-Mobile Home Internet performance varied widely. The good news is it didn't really affect my day-to-day online experiences.

These come from Speedtest, the service I've long used to gauge internet performance. As you can see, my upload and download numbers are all over the place. I've seen speeds as low as 6.8Mbps down and 9.4Mbps up and as high as 132.1 and 77.1. This is despite the gateway's little touchscreen display consistently showing four to five bars (much like on a phone) and the app reporting "very good" or "excellent" connection quality.

Let me pause to note that so many variables are involved here -- local congestion, proximity to towers, signal interference within the house and so on -- that my experiences can't be considered typical. They're my experiences. Your mileage absolutely may vary.

I can say that after some pretty concerning slowdowns during week one, I experimented with moving the gateway to different areas of the house. To my surprise, relocating it to a second-story window yielded a huge performance bump. Those are the numbers you mostly see in the chart above. Needless to say, gateway placement can make a big difference.

I also did some side-testing at my mother-in-law's farmhouse (about seven miles due west of where I live), where cable internet isn't available. Her only option until now has been a slow, expensive, data-capped satellite service.

After plugging in the gateway, I was chagrined to discover it showed only two bars, which is "weak" connectivity, according to the Home Internet app. Then I ran Speedtest. Download performance was hitting 126Mbps, which seemed amazing, while uploads were only about 9Mbps.

Why the disparities? See above regarding variables. I'll simply say that she went ahead and subscribed to the service, and for the most part, it's been working well. That's the key: The only way to know if T-Mobile Home Internet will be a good fit at your house is to try it.

Although I've had good results overall with performance -- I've streamed hours of 4K video, participated in countless Zoom meetings, downloaded big games to install and so on -- not everything about the service is perfect.

I consider nothing here a deal-breaker, but I recommend perusing those forums to see what issues might be problematic for you.

Want to get the best experience? Here are some ideas based on what I learned over the six weeks.

So after nearly two months with T-Mobile Home Internet, what's the verdict? I'm keeping it, at least for now. There's no contract, so I can always return to Comcast if things don't work out. Even if it's not perfect 100% of the time, neither is Comcast, and imperfection is a lot more tolerable when you're paying less than half what you were before.

If this service is available in your area, I'd say it's definitely worth a try. If nothing else, as noted above, the presence of a new competitor gives you a bargaining chip; you might be able to negotiate a lower rate from your current provider.