Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is $50/month. They’re using spare 5G capacity because they overbuilt their network. You’ll see congestion during peak usage times, but it’s fine otherwise.

View on HN

>You’ll see congestion during peak usage times

Yeah, that's kind of the issue. That, and latency.

Not OP, but I used tmobile ISP for over two years during the whole Covid era. Worked pretty good for what it is, managed to get about 200 Mbps down and 20 up. I hit 500 Mbps but moved away from that area at one point. I only just switched to fiber recently because a 1G fiber line was installed and only cost $60 a month.

>Worked pretty good for what it is,

Sure. The "for what it is" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. See also: it's rather expensive for what it is.

What? I feel like people coast on experiences from 5-10 years ago. This isn't a 3G hotspot. Ping time right now is 53ms and I'm getting 200/20 for $50, all included, no additional fees. This is outside their actual ideal service area too.

I'd love symmetric fiber for $50, but 'for what it is' isn't doing much lifting at all.

Eh, it's relative. You can get that for like 10 euros a month in Romania and they throw in a mobile phone and some cable channels to boot I think.

yeah but you can haphazardly hang fiber off of telephone poles in Romania

Hmm not sure if I totally agree. Like sure, it’s a no brainer for my situation since I get 1G fiber for $60. But I have a bunch of friends and family paying $50 for Comcast for 200/10 copper lines.

How is the latency for these 5G home internet services?

Over 100ms most of the time, it worked fine for WFH when I had meetings. Terrible if you want to game.

This is interesting since I remember having much lower latency for 3G, perhaps < 50 ms, about 10 years ago. :) At that time, some of my friends were even using the home 3G to play games.

That's rare. T-Mobile averages 53ms latency according to Ookla/Speedtest.net for multi-server latency. For wired connections, Xfinity averages 24ms, Cox 25ms, and Spectrum 31ms. So wireless does add an additional ~25ms of latency compared to wired, but 100ms is out of the ordinary.

Try the fast.com or speed.cloudflare.com instead. Ookla is pretty easy to game by the ISPs

T-mobile != T-Mobile ISP. For the better or worse, anything going through the ISP plan is bottom of the barrel. You can look through all the post on the T-Mobile ISP subreddit. Even those with 500 Mbps speed are close to 100 ms of latency.

Some of the people on my team had to switch back to Comcast after trying it for a few months. Video calls were laggy and would drop packets constantly. This was in Colorado fwiw.

Your experience is highly dependent on how close you are to the nearest mobile base station and its utilization profile. If it's distant or highly utilized, you will have degraded performance vs being closer or less utilized.

I've got Verizon 5G for $25/month extra on top of my cell phone bill, and the tower is right across the street. It's pretty competitive with Xfinity's 1.2Gbps service since they didn't bother throttling it. I also get 350Mbps up. Seeing 15ms pings to servers in Sacramento from SF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com