I’ve been waiting for about 2 years for the T-Mobile Home Internet to be available in my area (I suppose I was technically waiting on cell tower slots) and recently it was, so I got the “backup Internet” plan for $20/mo (no equipment fee)!
I have Verizon Fios at a deep discount (technology assessment is $94.78 for gigabit + Fios TV) due to the fact that my home is part of the Brambleton HoA so why would I need T-Mobile Home Internet? I like backups. I’ve been using a Verizon Wireless (hello, SPOF) MiFi with a 1GiB legacy data plan for $15/mo for the past few years and ending up paying around $20-25 on average because BGP + SmokePing sometimes chews up more than 1GiB per month! I have the backup connection in a Linux container running a WireGuard tunnel for IPv6 (for my PI allocation) and iptables NAT for IPv4. The failover is seamless for IPv6 but all connections reset for IPv4.
The T-Mobile backup Internet plan for $20/mo comes with 130GiB 5G data per month and “3G speeds” thereafter. That’s just fine since my Fios hardly ever goes out but it gives me peace of mind. The cellular router itself has 2x GigE ports and Wi-Fi and is built by a company called Arcadyan (model code G5AR). It’s got a little display that show signal strength and a QR code to download the T-Mobile app, which seems utterly useless:
It’s powered by USB-C (I just used the included power adapter), has a USB-C data port (CDC ACM, not Ethernet over USB), and has 2x LAN ports and 4x external antenna connectors. Luckily my townhome is 4 floors and I have this thing on the top floor, so I have no signal strength issues. RSSI is at -72 dBm and it’s using band n41, which is 2,496 to 2,690 MHz.
So, how does it perform? Pretty much the same as my cellphone on T-Mobile. Here’s a wget and MTR:
Now, on a more interesting note, SmokePing was nice & clean for awhile but this evening it got a little bumpy:
What happened around 1500 EST? It doesn’t seem to affect the speed but there some latency and, at times, severe loss. You can see the stark difference between the VZW (maybe power saving issues?) from the MiFi yesterday, though. I’ll see how this goes.
Anyway, I’m happy with the setup. I find it funny that they still have to assign a phone number to these devices even though they’ll never be used for voice or SMS.