T-Mobile wireless home internet offers a challenge to Incline’s legacy cable provider.
I know I’m not alone feeling chained to Spectrum. For years it’s been the only cable and wired broadband provider at Incline Village. And, frankly, that has made the company kind of cocky.
We at Unit 8 dumped Spectrum cable TV several years ago but kept the cable modem because there were no viable options for broadband. Knowing this, Spectrum felt comfortable charging us $75/mo. for internet only– which, until recently, was a bit poky compared to Comcast or AT&T fiber in other markets.
The early efforts to dominate the 5G home internet market
The big wireless carriers are battling over fixed-base wireless home internet. Verizon jumped in early and in one of its test markets– Sacramento– the service was really spotty and disappointing.
In a report on CBS13 I called out Verizon for what was, essentially, a public relations stunt. Verizon was not pleased.
The T-Mobile surprise
T-Mobile’s 5G network operates in a different frequency band that theoretically provides a greater range. I can tell you from personal experience it’s surprisingly good.
Background
I was exploring options to provide temporary broadband access to a rental property in midtown Sacramento. I noticed our family’s current mobile wireless carrier, T-Mobile, was offering existing customers on a qualifying plan a free 5G home gateway with no data caps for $30/mo. ($50/mo. if you don’t have existing wireless service). I ordered a gateway and it arrived a couple of days later.
Although T-Mobile’s website indicated the 5G gateway would work well at the given address, based on prior experience with Verizon I decided to conduct a field test with the new gateway on my car’s dashboard outside the rental property.
The gateway showed a very strong signal and an internet speed test was impressive- about 147 Mbps download and 107 Mbps upload. Perfectly adequate for my needs.
The Tahoe test
On a whim, I returned to the T-Mobile site to check the address 725 Fairview Blvd., 89451. Bingo! T-Mobile says 5G home internet is available at Incline Pines. Great. Trust, but verify! Mountains and trees have historically presented a challenge for mobile phones up here.
I set up the gateway on our kitchen counter at Unit 8 and the T-Mobile screen showed three out of five bars. I moved it closer to the back deck and got four bars. But signal strength doesn’t tell the whole story; the data speed is what really counts.
Wow. The internet speed at Incline was MUCH faster than in Sacramento! Check out the speed test with Spectrum on the left and T-Mobile on the right.
A few caveats…
Despite strong signal strength, 5G wireless will slow down with congestion– which may explain the speed difference between Incline and Sacramento. For this reason, T-Mobile technically only allows you to use the gateway at your registered address to avoid too many 5G customers in any given area. As far as I can tell, the company doesn’t enforce this geographic limitation but I imagine it might if it detects abuse from customers using the gateway for mobile internet use with RVs, boats, motels, etc.
If you work from home, I’d be wary of cutting the Spectrum cable without a little more testing. It might be worth it to run Spectrum and T-Mobile simultaneously for a month or two to watch for any patterns in reliability.
Finally, if you rely on Spectrum for your TV you’ll have to make some changes. With a 5G wireless gateway you will stream all your TV programs. You’re probably already doing this with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. We watch local Sacramento TV at Incline by streaming the DVR at our home in Sacramento. You may have that same option. If not, YouTube TV offers a very good streaming package with traditional cable offerings like CNN and your home market TV stations.
This is good to know! We always had t-mobile for our cell phones & had to dump it several years ago because service up here was so poor. I had to drive to Golfer’s Pass & park under the cell towers in order to get reception! T-mobile customer service was the best! I’d certainly favor t-mobile over Spectrum – today alone I lost connection while in session with 2 different clients
We switched from AT&T to T-Mobile a couple of years ago. I was leery because of previous T-Mobile stories I heard from friends. The service was great in urban areas but pretty spotty in the Tahoe basin– no cell service at all in South Lake Tahoe! But T-Mobile is aggressively building out its network, has a great family plan (Magenta) and offers free data overseas. I wasn’t too optimistic about the 5G gateway working at Incline because my T-Mobile iPhone usually defaults to 4G LTE. But I was pleasantly surprised! -George
I have been using T Mobil for Wifi for a few years now. I initially had the 4GL based system and while it worked well most of the time, I could not deal with the number of times the system would fail. I eventually bypassed the Wifi part of the device with my own and I got much more reliable performance, but still it was not as reliable as I wanted. I replaced the device on their suggestion and continued to have problems.
Eventually, they suggested the 5G solution. This is much better than the 4GL, but it does have its moments. Also, I note that the placement of the device is crucial. I do not know if other units will have as much difficulty as we had in placement. It could very well be that some units have better reception or poorer reception. It is definitely worth trying.
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