T-Mobile Internet any good?

I live in a rural area of SW Missouri and my ISP is WIFI from radio towers. It is slow for an exceptionally high price and not really reliable. I'm hoping to get more bang for my buck with T-Mobile. Anyone here have any experience with T-Mobile?

Briefly tried it, but couldn't end up using it because they use CG-NAT (with IPv4 and no IPv6 available, at least at the time I tried, which would have likely been another way around my issues). This means that multiple users share a public IP address, and you don't get your own, but rather one within a range reserved for this purpose. For many users, this won't be a problem; it just is for a few things I'm doing, none Hubitat-related specifically.

T-Mobile itself is pretty good where I live, though when I travel it varies widely, and jokes like this don't happen for no reason:

But for home Internet service, with the device in a fixed location, you should at least avoid that problem. :smiley:

Other than that, I didn't have any issues during the very brief period I tried it, but I'm guessing this is likely to be different in different regions, and I can't speak to yours specifically. Having grown up in a rural area, I certainly understand the struggles with Internet options! (Even in town now, I was on DSL until I got fiber late last year, one of the reasons I looked at T-Mobile in the first place! Cable was technically still an option, but I stuck to my word about never using them again, even though I was getting so tired of DSL speeds that almost backed down on that too...ha.)

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FWIW for cell phone service I've been a Verizon guy for many years as nothing I found could come close (for coverage). However we recently changed to T-Mobile (due to cost reasons) and been very happy.

Point being, T-Mobile (and maybe others) have come a long way and are likely nipping at Verizon's heels.

If I were you I would find a friend with T-Mobile cell service and see how it works in your home.

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I have been with Walmart Straight Talk for probably 10 years. Always worked 100%.

My local ISP charges me around $60 a month for 3 Mbps! I've been lucky for the last year and have enjoyed 30-60 Mbps due to a connection/programming error on their part.

T-Mobil is offering this try and return if not happy so ill try it. They are $50 a month and no increase ever with a minimum of 32 Mbps and if you're lucky close to 200 Mbps. 30 is ok for my purposes.

Thanks for the response fellows. I heard a rumor that T-Mobile bought Verizon. Doubt that's true.

I seriously doubt that as well. That would be big news.

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I have a bunch of them $50/mo no contract $3 static IP and I get between 400 and 800 down and 20 to 30 up. I had it as failover in 8 locations. I now have it as primary in 4 of them and converting the others. Could not be happier. I am even converting two fiber locations. $90 a month and no better service. ( I am not associated with T-mobile)

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I lived in SW MO for a number of years with the same issue. I tried T-mobile but it wasn't much good. Ended up with Verizon home internet which was very good. Not great speeds but better than DSL which was the only other option.

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You have exactly one way to find out if it will work well for you: Go try it.

At least in my area (Maine), they'll let you try it for 14 days and return it for a refund if it doesn't work. I just did that. They showed that I was blanketed by coverage, when in fact it was truly horrible. I tried it at home and at a shop we own 2 miles away. Neither was workable, with speeds at home barely reaching 5 mbps/down, 1 up, and about 10 mbps down, 1.5 up at the shop. For cell service, it generally showed No Service at home. and one bar at the shop, so the antenna for the internet device must be better than an iPhone's.

Cell coverage in rural areas is almost entirely dependent on proximity to local towers. No point in trying to crowd source an answer.

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It was my understanding that a static IP was only available for business accounts.

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most recently T-Mobile acquired Sprint (in 2020), but I doubt they'll be allowed to acquire Verizon due to monopoly concerns

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I've used it for 6 months now. If Tmobile has a good 5g signal that isn't saturated then its actually pretty decent. as Bertabcd said it uses CG-NAT so port forwarding on your router isn't going to happen, although it does have IPv6 now so maybe that will change. when I first got it I was getting 100-200 mbps. Its now dropped to about 60 which I am still okay with for what I do. The one thing you have to remember is Home Internet is at the bottom rung of priority so a mobile phone will always take priority over home internet so that means it will be the first to see degradation as more people hop on a tower.

We tried it. we are in an area listed as a Good 5g signal; we weren't event getting the speed we were getting with Spectrum. Add to that it needs to be near a window. If it isn't, you loose signal strength substantially. In our case the only windows that gave us a strong signal were in our guest rooms, which are not near where any of the HA equipment is, and moving it there wasn't really practical. Short answer if you have a good connection, I wouldn't switch, but if you are on DSL or something like that, it might be worth it, but keep in mind you may need to move all of your HA and Network gear to be close to a window.

Home Office? Not sure but my acct is a business account.

T-Mobile did just buy Mint however.

Another consideration for T-mobile is their apparent security issues.

Dum

T-Mobile bought Mint Wireless for 1.3 billion. Ryan Reynolds the actor has a 25% stake in it so he's about to get paid...

that explains why i've been getting so many more spam calls and they know info about me

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Received my T-Mobile router yesterday and have it up and running. Found one spot where I seem to have consistent 3 bars (out of 5 - signal strength). Below is my speed test from this morning. Pretty good for my area. I have a neighbor who is on Whisper and pays around $75 a month for less speed.

A bit concerned with the slow upload speed. Probably only important when I backup to the cloud.

So my original plan was to unplug my existing Asus AC3100 from my ISP device and plug it into one of the ports on the T-Mobile router. Problem is my Asus and all my HA gear is in the lower level of my house, and the T-Mobile is upstairs. Without moving equipment, or running a cat6 cable, is there a way to connect my Asus to the T-Mobile with WIFI? And would that be a good or bad idea?

Got lucky. I have found a spot near my Asus router giving me 3 bars....hoorah! so possibly last thing to try is plugging the input to my Asus router into one of the ports on the tmobile router. Anything i should know before doing that?

Run an ethernet cable if you can. No substitute for the speed and reliability of a wired network.

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