T-Mobile Home Internet Review

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.

My experiance with the homeinternet had for 6 months calling weekly for 6 months adds up to a lot of pain points biggest problem is the techs anyways I was promised by 10:30am I should finally have highspeed internet my adverse speed is 8 mbps download put up with this way to long today my pain points should get. Enter.  We'll see if all goes good that's cool but if I have been lied to a can always talk with management would I recommend. Anyone tobsignup with T-Mobile no way most people won't put up with crap I have had to do. Point is can I trust T-Mobile?

Hello. We have had constant issues with our T-Mobile Home Internet. We started with high hopes though were not sure what our benefits would be since we never get more than 2 bars on any of our other devices including some iPhones (8, XR, 12).  Our other devices don't seem relevant for this comparison (computers) as they are not T-Mobile SIM provided. But the other four devices as mentioned have never had more than 2 bars of coverage since the 1990's and often drop to 1 bar.

The reason this is relevant is that even our cell phones say we do not have T-Mobile Wi-Fi.

With our T-Mobile Internet, which we received a couple months ago with the new device people are mentioning, it also says it receives 2 bars. It sometimes goes to 1 bar (turning yellow) and we don't know if it sometimes goes below 1 or not as it shows 2 bars but we lose the wi-fi, on average, at east once. day. It has caused us to otherwise unnecessarily still have to pay for our (hope to be previous) internet provider since we need the internet service for work so are suffering with the poor T-Mobile Home Internet service, but really want to be able to keep it but need it to work.  We decided to write this since we had to go to our backup provider at least once each day last week, now again today. Ridiculous.

​​​​​​​A gentleman from T-Mobile said they had a technician check the tower that our service comes from and, after about a week of checking, it appears to be overloaded with users. Since T-Mobile supposedly limited people to be able to use the service to assure that would not happen, that does not make sense. We had tried the T-Mobile Home Internet in all locations and levels of our home to see if there was any better reception, as the instructions recommended.  Upstairs, main level, downstairs, rooms to the N, NE, NW, E SE S SW, W, near windows and not, everywhere but the roof (which it does not say to do since that is outside). So, location of the device in the house is not a factor.

So, we are not sure if the device is faulty and does not properly provide W-Fi?  The top can show 2 bars (well, not it just turned to 1 bar) and says it can detect devices, but none of the devices can get Wi-Fi.

Has anyone else had a similar problem?  Thank you for listening and for your help.

Initially the service fit my needs - two tvs streaming and use of pc by both my wife and I.  For the last month T-Mobile has been working on upgrading the towers around us.  We can't stream shows and the internet is at a snails pace.   If everytime TMobile wants to do an upgrade we suffer for at least a month, the service isn't worth it.  I hate Optimum but we're going to go back.

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.

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. 

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

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.

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! :-)

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.