My AT&T fiber unexpectedly went down yesterday; it wasn't for long - rebooting the fiber gateway brought it back up again.
Nonetheless, it made me wonder if I should get a backup internet plan. The cheapest plan I could find was from T-Mobile - "Home Internet Backup" is $20/mo, and gives you 130 GB of data per month.
If you have this plan, can you share your experiences with it? I am particularly interested in knowing if the WiFi radios in the gateway can be turned off - so I can just plug it into my UniFi Cloud Gateway and leave it alone.
As I've said, I'm on att internet air, which is 5g. It's been pretty good. My spectrum coax went down when power was lost. This does not. I'm able to stream, although i don't too much.
I pay 55 per month, but if i was on a regular att cellular phone plan instead of friends and family, if would be 35 per month.
I bet you could get it for 35 a month.
Probably not what you're looking for though.
Edit: I'm pretty sure i can turn off wifi.
Edit 2:
Sort of on track with this post, but more power than internet related.....
I've been looking again at providing UPS/battery backup for a few devices. I was swapping out a socket (outlet) on Wednesday and forgot to shut down the hub before turning off the RCBO (breaker). Some fun ensued later that day when all Z Wave failed (the logs showed everything was switching on/off but sod all responded). To cut a long story short(ish) I finally bought a Konnected UPS to go inline with the C-8, and was thinking about doing similar for other critical devices (cable modem, Pi4, UDR).
While perusing for devices I came across the 'Nice Hub Powerbank' and thought 'what a good idea'. It's designed as a UPS for Fibaro's Home Center and Yubii hubs but also has a SIM card. The device has a WiFi access point. Fibaro and Yubii hubs have a setting that allow you to set a failover network connection so you point that to the SSID of this device. When the power goes out, the UPS takes over and the hub connects to the failover WiFi that it provides.
I know the above could be sorted with failover WAN for the router but I thought:
this was cool for about £150/$150
the failover network setting in Fibaro's hub(s) was useful
I do not have tmobile home internet backup, however i do have the regular home internet.
A quick google search says it uses one of the same gateway devices.
Sagemcom Fast 5688W
I would imagine its setup like the regular home internet.
IF it is, here is what i know.
Tmobile gives very little control of the device. So no bridge mode or port forwarding controls. The service is cgnat, so external access is much more of bear to setup. I am not sure if that is a concern, it has been a challenge for me. No control of wifi radios to disable. User control of the device is all but non existant.
There is an app from an independant developer on the playstore that will allow you to disable the wifi radio among some other things that tmobile doesnt give access to. I believe it is called hint.
I am not sure if this helps or not, but figured id share.
When i get home i can screenshot available options from the tmobile app if youd like them.
I haven't tried AT&T Air or TMobile's yet. If I ever pull the trigger I will likely do AT&T Air as it is pretty low cost (well... kind of low - $47, I just checked) for existing AT&T customers.
Verizon has something too. This stuff is not everywhere though; check to see if it's even available. AT&T Internet Air is my only internet service, and, as I said, it's been pretty good.
Just to close this out, the HINTControl app that @cwwilson08 referred to is available on GitHub:
There are binaries for Android/iOS/Windows/Linux/OS X available here:
Now that I'm fairly certain I can disable the WiFi radios, I am very like to give T-Mobile's backup internet service a shot. At $20 a month, it seems like a good deal for my needs.
I am doing backup with Starlink. They had the basic dish package $100 off a few months ago and their "Roam" mode is only 50/month for 50 GB and can be paused. My AT&T service was very reliable until earlier this year when I had two outages which isn't good for work from home. I already had pfSenese as my router and it natively supporting gatway groups and priority so if I leave the service up and connected to one of the free ports I can configure AT&T as a priority 1 and the Starlink as priority 2. A plus is that the Starlink "router" has bypass mode so I control in my network.
After 4 months of testing, I now plan to suspend and resume services as needed saving the $50 a month and also power on the dish only when needed to save 35 watts of power. So far I have the rules in the hubitat to power down the dish when I have primary connectiivy and power up the dish when AT&T is down.
This guy is really good at covering the spectrum of cellular internet offerings and your T-Mobile question is likely answered in one of his videos going back over the last couple years.
Not in this recent video but maybe in one of the others, or certainly in the questions people ask in the Comments.
EDIT ADD: Verizon clearly had taken the lead on giving you the control you'd expect/desire in their modem/router boxes. Including making them a simple bridge to the rest of your infrastructure.
EDIT ADD 2: Having just finished watching this and updating myself on their offerings, whatta train wreck they have turned their offerings into. That Backup offering level might be the best deal of all.
EDIT ADD 3: Looking into this further; at first glance it seems "typical T-Mobile" whereby you think it might offer what you could smartly integrate...and then it turns out NOT. Doesn't seem like this is intended to be plugged into a router with a second failover WAN port....more for -"your sitting there on your laptop/phone and need a secondary WIFI access point when your main one goes dead". I may be selling it short but rarely does T-Mobile surprise on the upside anymore.
For anyone else interested in doing this. Just received the T-Mobile gateway, and set it up using the T-Mobile app (as directed in the instructions). When you do that, it disables the ability of the HINT Control app to login as admin.
The solution for me was simple. I factory reset the gateway, and directly connected it to my iMac using ethernet. I then used HINT Control on the iMac to shut down the 2.4GHz radio. It is recommended not to shut the 5GHz radio, so I didn't, but I reduced its power.
I don't have the gateway placed in a great location, but I still get 200 down, 5-10 up. Which is all I need for backup internet.
$20 per month with autopay. $25 if you don't use autopay.
No special qualifications. I don't have a T-Mobile for anything else. It would be even cheaper if my cell phone were with T-Mobile.
You're limited to 130 GB of high speed data a month; it drops to unlimited data at 3G after that.
I'll add that I'm very impressed at how well it works, and how fast the Unifi UCG is at switching to the backup WAN when the primary WAN is down (or disconnected on purpose).
I'm currently paying for cell backup service for my home alarm system. That costs me about $22 a month. I'm going to be canceling that.
I’ve got two T-Mobile lines, one for my iPhone, one for my iPad.
I wonder if the 130 GB high speed data would be combined with data usage on the other two mobile lines.
T-Mobile coverage is poor where our house is, but T-Mobile iPhones (and iPads) will use WiFi if available, and not count that data usage.
We have Xfinity Gigabit for the house and AT&T DSL for backup. The AT&T DSL is rock solid, but slow. AT&T is phasing out copper landlines and DSL in 2025 (I also have AT&T copper landline for my law firm’s fax at the house), so I will have to figure out a replacement for 2025. Good to know about the T-Mobile option. I pay $300 per month for the AT&T copper landline and DSL, which is in addition to the Xfinity GB primary service.
