Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
[flagged] T-Mobile ISP (t-mobile.com)
27 points by yincrash on Oct 31, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments



> By checking this box you agree that T-Mobile can contact you about purchasing T-Mobile Home Internet, including future Home Internet offers, via autodialed call, email, or text to the number provided above. Consent is not a condition of purchase; you may also call 1-844-839-5057 to get started. (required)

"Check Availability" does nothing useful. The landing page is an opt-in lead generation tool.


I'm glad this is the top comment. I clicked on the link and typed my address like a dummy hoping to get a binary yes or no answer. This is kind of infuriating and a waste of ones time.


Flagged post as ad spam.


Wish I had read this comment before trying out the tool.


> During congestion, Home Internet customers may notice speeds lower than other customers due to data prioritization.

> Video streaming resolution depends on available speeds. For best performance, leave video streaming applications at their default resolution setting

Food for thought in their terms.


On their mobile offering, if you have a data plan that features unlimited streaming/high speed data (that is, a plan with an option to not count streaming applications in your data allowance), they will stream the content of these partner services at lower quality than you would normally be capable of. I expect a similar story here.


We were able to be included in the test roll out for this, but we didn’t end up sticking with it. Our biggest problem was the reception in our house was pretty bad. The box also doesn’t lend itself to being mounted somewhere like a window very well. Also setting it up with our existing wifi equipment and not using the built in mediocre WiFi router wasn’t super easy.


This is pretty wild, $50/month for unlimited data. It looks like between new cell tech and low orbit satellites we're finally going to see real competition between ISPs in the coming years.


I live in a semi-rural area and with no cable/fiber/dsl options available.

In my experience, most home internet offerings from the big mobile carriers will throttle you fairly quickly if your usage goes to a few hundred GB (easy to do with streaming, os updates, etc). They may not have a limit, but once you're throttled it is basically unusable.


Seems reasonable compared to having no internet at all, especially compared to satellite internet service like DirecWay/HughesNet/Echo Star.


Thank heavens! This tech can't come soon enough. My ISP runs a co-ax just below the surface of the road to my side of the street to the junction box. It then runs the co-ax along the edge of my driveway along the property line with my neighbor. It then runs the co-ax across my driveway, laying the cable in the section divider groove with a thin layer of caulking over the cable. I literally run over the cable every time I park my vehicle.

I've seen other places in our neighborhood where this is done in the sidewalks and the cable has been ripped up on the sidewalk. If pedestrians don't step over the cable they'll trip over it. It's a complete joke.


Where do you live? I have never seen such a half-assed install. I'm not doubting what you described, just curious what location has such lax building codes.


Phoenix AZ


But, is it really unlimited? Or is it the typical "unlimited [star]" where the [star] points to a tiny, 5 point font, footnote at the bottom of a page where they actually detail that you can use as much as you like, up until you use X units, then they throttle you until next month, unless you pay an extra $39.95 for extra data units.


It’s a valid question. T-Mobile for their cell service only offer “unlimited” plans but it’s two kinds of “unlimited”. There’s “5gb at LTE speed and then unlimited at 2G speed” and there is “truly 100% unlimited with no catch”.

I’ve run up over 100gb in one month on my truly unlimited T-Mobile plan and never had any issues. But who knows what their ISP offer will be.


The truly unlimited will de-prioritize you after around 50GB iirc.


what even is unlimited? there is a finite amout of time in a month, and a finite amount of throughput per second.

xGbps*2.628e+6s is already your max.


This is interesting. Most of cell towers are on battery backup for at least 24 hours. As long as you have a battery backup for your device it should allow for Internet Service even during power outages.

It will all be interesting when Elon finally gets Starlink up and running. If there was a way for a mobile phone to connect directly via sat chip, you could do voice over IP and do away with cellular service all together. It could serve as your connection for everything. What a disruption for the Telco's.


If your phone supports cellular over IP (T-Mobile does, for example), this should work if the StarLink terminal supports a wifi hotspot function. You will still need a pizza box sized sat terminal.


We got this last week. I just called Spectrum to cancel our service. It’s good enough for the price, especially since Spectrum raised the price of Internet to $69.99 this month.

- Speeds vary, but we seem to average around 100/20. The highest I’ve seen is 150/50. The lowest is 50 down. I have (separately) seen some awful upstreams—around 2 Mbps up.

- Latency is server-dependent but worse than cable. It’s probably not good for latency-sensitive applications (like some games).

There is one important caveat: T-Mobile uses CGN. Their network is IPv6 with 464XLAT bridging to non-IPv6 sites.


If you don't mind, does it give you a /64 subnet? And do you know if you can get a larger subnet?

I am interested in this, but I have three VLAN subnets for my network, and the last time I tried it, it turned into a massive headache.


> If you don't mind, does it give you a /64 subnet? And do you know if you can get a larger subnet?

It does give you a /64. I don’t know whether it’s possible to get a larger one.


T-mobile should be doing a home broadband push sometime soon. Their merger deal with sprint requires it[1]:

> The deal is contingent on the two companies agreeing to stipulations on the development of next-generation 5G technology and the expansion of broadband internet access to rural areas.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sprint-t-mobile-strik...


Well heck. I have to actually consider this. Most of the time I am at home I use my cell's LTE since it's better than my cable. Will it be just as good when I'm playing LOL and the rest of my family has 3 video streams running is the question. Also MediaCom has a cap of 200GB a month which I hit every month making their plan even more expensive.


Signed up this morning for the service. I should have the gateway next week. A few things to note

1) The gateway has built in wifi (and is provided free) 2) It provides 2 ethernet ports 3) You use an app to see most of it (how much data you've used, etc). 4) They say when 5g is in the area, it will be upgraded to it.


What area of the country? I got waitlisted in New England.


Just south Lancaster, PA. I know a co-worker who is north of the city is waitlisted.


Kudos to T-Mobile. Seems like technology changes before government can get its act together to come up with regulation (often ill-considered and ineffective, with the possibility of just being regulatory capture anyway).


Really curious what the latency numbers will be. I would love to drop Comcast.


Hoping this will be good for rural internet. Not holding my breath, though


Wish the UK had something like this.

I'm paying approx 30usd/mo for unlimited 4G in Sweden. The coverage is fantastic. Middle of nowhere, still getting 1MB/s symmetric or so.


> Wish the UK had something like this.

I believe it does. Three offer unlimited data for £22/month, with 5G in a few areas. I would not be surprised if other providers have similar offers.


This seems to follow the craze of mobile broadband in the UK. Unlimited data is a very nice option to have though


I love their tag line "Everyone deserves to be connected."




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: