T-Mobile Home Internet Review

The two biggest issues I have with the service are high latency and lack of capacity, and my metro area is >170k (and that's being generous). A base 60ms that doubles, and not getting a consistent 50Mbps down and sometimes <1Mbps uploads and make not only competitive gaming painful, but multiple users online simultaneously a pain. And at $60/mo when Spectrum can guarantee 200Mbps down consistently for $100/mo, it's just sad. Thing is, I'm patient and I know the service will be much better as buildout continues, but it was $50/mo a few weeks back and there's already been a price hike (not for folks prior to the raise though). I'm actually a disappointed with this service at the moment though there are things I like about it. Just… they need more capacity in order to truly deliver the minimum 50Mbps. 

Unfortunately, it goes deeper than just allowing you to set forwarding rules in the router... be that manually or via UPnP.

Unsolicited inbound traffic is not properly passing through the forward facing layer.  It is a problem inherent to the 464XLAT approach they implememted to support dual IPv4 and IPv6 addressing.

Until they switch to a better method of managing IPv4 traffic through their IPv6 only network, there will be issues.

I have found a solution with one VPN provider, but the extra features to make it work would cost an extra $16/month--and that is at their best annual subscription rates (one year of static IP plus 2 years of VPN)  Windscribe is the only one that I have been able to confirm they have a strategy to do specifically what is needed to truly get around this mess.

One of the core issues is bound to the fact that the public IP you wind up with is not actually JUST your IP--it can still be shared with others using the same service.  So basically, you need to be securing that public IP for your use in order to forward ports properly.  This is what ramps up the cost at Windscribe.

Many offer P2P support through the paid side of their VPN services, but it only works partially... basically where you can use stateful inspection and such.  It gets around issues with BitTorrent and such... but does not necessarily work for unsolicited inbound connections, which can break some P2P communication with games--especially if that game is running on a console.

The TLDR:  until TMO restructures their core network topology for the service to more properly support dual-stack IPv4/v6, problems will persist regardless of what is going on with their modems.

So here is my take on T-Mobile Home Internet. Signal quality is everything. If you get good signal, it performs well. But if your signal strength is 2 bars or less, look out, high latency, low throughput, and constantly loss of service. When I travel in the RV, I have had good experiences with the service, but at home it was a problem, and T-Mobile customer service was not able to help me solve the issue. Note I fixed the issue at home with a 5G signal booster (product I bought is a Hi Boost 4k, installed July 2022). Before I installed the signal booster, I had lousy internet performance, 1-2 signal bars. After I installed the product, I now have insanely fast internet, and 4-5 signal bars. I have a background in signal processing, so I am going to get a bit technical. I live on a lake, and there is a larger ridge of trees adjacent to my property that cuts into the signal for 5G. This was never a problem with LTE, but as you have heard, 5G degrades faster over distances, and stuff like trees smashes signal strength. After installing the product, signal strength increased as follows: 700MHz (LTE) 50dB, 800Mhz (5G mid band) 43dB, 1.9Ghz (5G hi band) 52dB (Verizon operates at this band), 2.5Ghz (5G hi band) 49dB (both Verizon and T-Mobile operate at this band). What does this all mean, I now get the SAME quality and insanely fast internet that folks in the cities and suburbs get on my T-Mobile Home Internet.

*EDIT* I meant to say “or DONT require a VPN for work or personal use.”

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. I didn't have to make any setting adjustments to make it work. The only thing that was needed from time to time, is that you might have to use specific VPN servers for certain applications or websites to work. But this is a common problem most have when using a VPN regardless of isp.

The only issue I had was with my voip phone modem. 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.

I'm still waiting for T-Mobile to add Port Forwarding to this device. I returned the unit I bought and I cannot purchase this home internet service with the lack of Port Forwarding…

Are you listening T-Mobile…???

Thank you for the detailed reply. That helps me better understand what is happening with their home internet gateway. I will try to be patient while they make their system more functional for all of us! :-)

I'm surprised that T-Mobile blocks inbound unsolicited IPv6 connections. Xfinity doesn't have this restriction. If I'm not mistaken, that would go a long way in mitigating the port forwarding issues.

That's interesting. I was not aware of the Xfinity service. Unfortunately they tell me their service is not available in my town!!!

n2itivguy wrote:

The two biggest issues I have with the service are high latency and lack of capacity, and my metro area is >170k (and that's being generous). A base 60ms that doubles, and not getting a consistent 50Mbps down and sometimes <1Mbps uploads and make not only competitive gaming painful, but multiple users online simultaneously a pain. And at $60/mo when Spectrum can guarantee 200Mbps down consistently for $100/mo, i

100% agree with you. T-Mobile sent me a customer feedback questionnaire, and one of the questions was how I graded T-Mobile when it came to unexpected bill hikes. You can guess how I graded T-Mobile on this one.