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There's no data cap, so I was never concerned about that. Did I believe that T-Mobile's Home Internet offering could be the fast and reliable internet savior I was looking for — no. However, the carrier's been making speedy upgrades to the towers in my area, with my nearby town even getting 5G. With these expansions, I decided to take the chance and get the service. I figured that for $50 a month, it was worth taking a flyer to see how it panned out.
This device is a WiFi 6 modem/router combo, compatible with both 5G and 4G LTE bands. T-Mobile states that users will reach 33 Mbps downloads at the bare minimum, but depending on your location and wireless signal, speeds could reach up to around 182 Mbps. Uploads are similar, starting at about 6 Mbps but reaching up to approximately 23 Mbps if you’re in a 5G zone. And T-Mobile’s service uses the cell towers that also provide service to our phones — Starlink wants to put 12,000 satellites into orbit to power its service, potentially obstructing our view of the cosmos.
Netgear’s new Nighthawk M6/M6 Pro 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Hotspot Router
Either way, the setup process is relatively simple, and once complete, the app gives some helpful info. When the LTE WiFi Gateway arrived, inside was a simple white box with a pre-installed SIM card and a power adapter. So, I plugged it in, downloaded the companion app onto my phone, and began setup. Forbes Home adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. To the best of our knowledge, all content is accurate as of the date posted, though offers contained herein may no longer be available.
Even though it shows full bars on our devices, it loads very slowly it works better when I turn my Wi-Fi off and just use my data, so what is the point in even having Wi-Fi. There were issues at first with yhe internal wifi going out on a daily basis. I worked with tech and between us dug into the 'guts' of the system to resolve the issues, and tech support was great trying to help. It took several weeks and finally one of the techs told me about a workaround that might fix the problem because we were getting no where. I too just went with Tmobile Home internet a few weeks ago, finally told Cox to F off in Glendale, AZ.
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It’s not available in all T-Mobile areas yet, but it’s growing. You can get T-Mobile Home Internet in parts of 27 states and 450 cities and towns in the US. I use a VPN all of the time and I have had no issues with it other than a minor slow down in connection speeds, which is to be expected.
$60 was tacked on to my monthly T-Mobile bill, taxes and fees included. So, we are not sure if the device is faulty and does not properly provide W-Fi? The top can show 2 bars and says it can detect devices, but none of the devices can get Wi-Fi. When connected directly to the gateway it had a tendency to drop calls. I then connected my old router to the gateway and then connected the voip modem to it and the problem went away.
This service is terrible!!
I wound up having to bring it up high as possible on the top floor and as close to a window as possible in the direction of the cell tower. Eventually, it finally got a connection and I was good to go. It didn’t maintain the best connection so I would up eventually disconnecting it.
The router has a battery in it, so you can walk around with it and test out the signal strength in different spots. When I lost power at my home, I was using the LTE gateway and it was able to keep me online for a few hours until electricity was restored. The battery acts as a full system backup allowing all functions to operate from the built-in cell.
I did all my work over a corporate OpenVPN installation for a week without a problem. You don't need to worry about data caps or prioritization on this service. I used more than a terabyte a month and did not encounter anything that looked consistently like deprioritization.
An avid movie fan, Trey's career also includes being a film critic while obtaining his Master's in Cinema Studies from NYU. Sign up for Fully Mobilized newsletter to get our top mobile tech stories delivered right to your inbox.
The front of the gateway has a power indicator light and a button that, when pressed, uses the power light to indicate LTE signal strength. Each gateway has a built-in battery, the LTE option has a 5200mAh battery whereas the 5G gateway uses a 5000mAh, which is maintained to full-charge while plugged in. However, those batteries are utilized very differently between the two options. The T-Mobile Home Internet companion app is used to initialize and set up the gateway, regardless of which gateway is being set up, and get the network details. Within the app, I had to assign passwords to each of the networks, 2.4GHz, and 5GHz, and if you choose, you can rename the networks. Although, with the 5G gateway, there's only a single SSID that dynamically changes from 2.4GHz and 5GHz as needed.
Therefore, you could just make calls for "free" (there's a monthly fee) as long as you're within range of a Wi-Fi signal. However, there is something odd about T-Mobile at in my part of the neighborhood. There is actually a tower in the shopping center across the street from my neighborhood (it’s decently close by). This has been confirmed by T-Mobile reps via phone who thought it to be incredibly odd.
However, the number of satellites and whether you can get the dish a clear view of the sky does. Even though T-Mobile doesn't support using the High-Speed Internet Gateway anywhere other than the address it is registered at, I had to take it to an area with better signal coverage. Using my trusty Anker Powerhouse II 400 to power the router, I took a little drive. Though the nearest town to me does have solid 5G coverage, it isn't going to break any speed records.
The opinions expressed are the author’s alone and have not been provided, approved, or otherwise endorsed by our partners. We do not present information about every offer available. The information and savings numbers depicted above are for demonstration purposes only, and your results may vary. I spent a week talking to support techs as they made network-side adjustments that didn't make any difference. Then T-Mobile swapped out my modem and everything got better, so I'm comfortable blaming the hardware rather than T-Mobile's network. There's a basic web-based management page that lets you see the status of your connection and configure the modem's very few settings.
