T Mobile 5g Hotspot Review

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I was excited about the idea of ​​T-Mobile’s Internet service. It was a bit of a letdown.

T Mobile 5g Hotspot Review

I first heard about it on T-Mobile’s home internet service: it’s $50 (price includes a special route), free contract and data cap, and 5G and LTE for phone lines or towing. As many in the US can probably tell, I’m not in love with my traditional ISP – They often push against its 1.2TB data cap, and $80 a month feels like a lot to pay for my example 400Mbps service. So I wondered: should I, a remote worker and heavy internet user, who streams video, plays video games and backs up to the cloud, be fine with internet delivered over the air instead of cable?

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After several weeks of testing, the TL;DR answer appears to be no; Despite the T-Mobile site telling me my email was eligible, the router almost always had a “weak” cellular signal, and there were so many drops and delays that even my non-techie wife had to connect see you again after a few weeks with it. . However, the thing about mobile internet is that my experience won’t necessarily be the same as yours, even if you live a few islands away from me. So take this review for what it is: one person’s experience of what it’s like in a small, non-specific part of eastern Washington state.

Before we get into the specifics of my experience, let’s start with what will be universal to those who use the service: the router hardware and the setup process. The router supports Wi-Fi 6, which is nice to see, and it has a small round button on top that you can use to see various stats like how many devices are connected to your network and how good the cellular connection is. On the back, there’s room for a power plug on the side (frankly massive), two Ethernet ports, a power button and a few clips that allow you to connect the battery backup.

When you look at this picture, you might be as excited as I was when you see that the port is USB-C. I don’t know why the router manufacturer, Nokia Solutions & Networks put it there, but the RJ-11 phone port is now non-functional, according to the router’s manual (pdf). Downfall!

When you connect the router and turn it on, it will ask you to access T-Mobile’s app using a QR code that appears on the screen. I had a lot of frustration with the app at first, until I realized that I had to connect to the router’s Wi-Fi network before pressing the “setup device” button. As far as I can tell, that step is not covered in the live guide setup, nor is it hinted at in the app itself. The setup process was a breeze after I figured it out, even with the app prompting me to choose my network name and enter a password (the default name and password are printed on the bottom of the device, if you prefer. just leave it). Then the app had time for me to set a good spot on the route where it could pick up a signal.

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That process was pretty fun. It has a road map on it so you can walk around with it and test the signal strength in different places. (However, the battery doesn’t seem to work as a backup power source. If it’s not connected to power, you can’t get any Wi-Fi.) As I said before, this feature doesn’t help me. lots of things; upstairs or the view, next to the window or in the middle of my house, I got a solid two closing of the service (out of five) – even taking it outside did not help, not that I left if I could there. if i got the perfect sign.

The app doesn’t make it clear whether you’re using LTE or 5G, but if you dig into the router’s web GUI, you can see which cell bands it’s using. Following Google’s band notes, I managed while writing that the router is primarily connected to LTE and uses 5G as a secondary connection. Of course, as T-Mobile says on its website, that can change based on signal strength and availability, time of day, and other factors.

I ended up doing what I felt would be the most comfortable way: in the window facing the city. Then it was just a matter of disconnecting the current access point (I didn’t want to talk through the T-Mobile router) and connecting the router to a new cellular-powered router to connect almost all of my IoT devices to my new home network.

At first everything seemed fine. I’ve gotten download speeds anywhere from 73 to 135 Mbps, and I’ve even seen upload speeds of up to 20 Mbps. For the first day or two I didn’t really have any problems – when I used the internet it seemed to be the same experience as when accessing via wire (and Siri could also play Apple Music. on the HomePods, which is completely broken on my regular setup for some reason). The router also performed brilliantly – the internet on my laptop was just as fast in my office next to the router as it was in my room, which is downstairs and on the other side of the house.

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A hiccup can slowly build up. Sometimes webpages would struggle to load, or I’d cross streams in slow motion and notice that everyone’s profile pictures were in gray squares until the actual smileys loaded one by one (that’s how I learned that slow motion doesn’t out to store these images, for some reason). At one time the speed was so bad that Twitter would take literally minutes to load.

There were also some periods where the internet would be visible for several minutes at a time, with my browser immediately indicating that I could not connect when I tried to navigate to the site. The frequency of power outages or delays varies – some days I had only occasional failures, and some days the internet was mostly unusable. There weren’t a ton of perfect days, but they were done.

From what I can tell, this has almost always been an issue with the service itself and not the router (although there was one extremely long issue that appeared to be a router issue, so I just fired up the machine and hung up). I could shoot between the machines in my house just fine – I’m just cut off from the outside. I asked T-Mobile what was causing these issues and they told me “while you may see slower speeds at certain times of the day due to network congestion, 30 seconds to load pages doesn’t sound like a normal experience.” I asked for ideas on what he could do, but he didn’t get an answer.

Since one expects to be ready to jump on the latest news at any moment, this was obviously not ideal for my use case. I’m sure my boss and coworkers got annoyed every time I said something along the lines of “well, I’ll take it and start my internet activity again.” It also caused ambiguity in my personal life – while I was trying to watch YouTube with my wife, you would sometimes comment on the “annual payment”. (Remember this is someone who is perfectly happy watching DVDs.) I’m also having trouble running online games, with ping swinging like a pendulum from a useful ~30ms to an unplayable 900ms. You can see the result of that in the video below.

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What kind of work does that look like? There’s something in the clip in your head that you might not want to see if you’re that type of person.

It’s not that T-Mobile Home Internet never worked. I would say most of the time it was just fine. I could play the game for hours

In my testing, and to a large extent I was surprised that the experience could be like that on supercellular. I also find that I can do something very welcome when I call friends and family. When my office was working, I really couldn’t tell the difference between it and my regular cable provider. It’s just that I couldn’t trust him to work well, and as someone who works at home, that’s a big problem.

Each service now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it

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