Can T-Mobile 5G Internet Compete With Comcast? Yes But...

My @Comcast Xfinity bill reached a record $250 per month in September and I had enough. After wasting hours of time on the phone I was able get my monthly rate down $50 to $200 a month after giving up all my premium television service, voice, and was still having weekly internet outages. With all that time and frustration, I still had a $2400 annual bill along with a DVR to record commercial TV and internet access. No thank you Comcast. I have to have reliable fast internet in my profession and I decided to give @T-Mobile a try. Here is what I learned...

The T-Mobile service is only $50 per month, including taxes and the speeds were reliable enough to work from home and even support VR gaming. The downside so far has been the need to daily re-boot the home router and there have been several instances where the Internet simply looses connection and requires a re-boot. The T-Mobile router, made by Nokia has a tendency to run hot. I am looking into a cooling solution with a fan that fits under the unit. I will test it out to see if the cooling reduces the number of times I need to re-boot. As you can see from the picture below I only get 3 bars of service, but that is adequate to support the 18 devices used in my network.

The router is not very sophisticated and doesn't support a true guest network. I plan to purchase a separate router and disable the T-Mobile WiFi. I have a top of the line Netgear Nighthawk router that I bought to support Comcast high speed internet, but it is not compatible with the T-Mobile router so I will need to invest another $300 in a router that will take the ethernet input from T-Mobile. It is a small price to pay to segregate my IoT and smart TV devices on a guest network from my PC network. The new router will also have its own firewall to add another layer of protection from the increasing number of cyber threats attacking home and business networks.

With 18 active endpoints my average download speed is 311 Mbps which is more than enough for all but the most demanding gaming applicaitons. Video streaming, email, IoT web cameras, web conferences, VPN, VPN phone, and browsing all work satisfactorily.

Bottom line: T-Mobile internet service is an exceptional value at $50 per month. The daily re-booting is a pain and I would not recommend the service if you travel and rely on IoT devices such as Ring doorbells or security cameras as there is no way to remotely re-boot the router to get it back online. I added YouTube TV to replace Comcast TV. YouTube TV includes unlimited DVR storage in the cloud and costs $60 per month yielding an annual savings of $1,080 annually.

Further testing: The next time the T-Mobile service goes down, I plan to use my hotspot on my smartphone for my work at home needs and see if the router recovers on its own without a re-boot. If it does that would give some level of confidence that T-Mobile Network could be relied upon while traveling.

Thanksgiving update: since posting this article originally I have not had to reboot my router. My Internet speeds have been consistently high. As T-Mobile continues to upgrade their network it is my expectation that the service will prove to be highly reliable. I will provide an update next Thanksgiving and give you a report on one years worth of T-Mobile internet experience.

Update 2/1/2022 I updated the graph on performance and have to say that T-Mobile is as unreliable as Comcast / Xfinity. To be fair, Comcast ran a new line to my home AFTER I disconnected the service and going back to Comcast may prove to be more reliable and faster. I a currently working with T-Mobile to address the reliability issues.