Tuesday, April 27, 2021

More T-Mobile Home Internet

In our ongoing internet access comparison, we cancelled the cable internet.  I can't tell you how oppressive it feels to have a data cap.  For a few weeks we measured daily usage and found it within the cap, but just like the old days of limited cellular minutes, there's that nagging feeling of knowing you might go over your allocation, even if you can afford it. That cap in not hanging over a our heads with T-Mobile Home Internet.

Now in the 3rd month of our T-Mobile Wireless Home Internet experience, a few changes have been noted, the first of which is that we are now using the 1700/2100 MHz cellular band as our primary channel, instead of the legacy 1900 MHz band. Also, the upload speeds have slowed, topping out at 10 Mbps. Is that a new upload 'cap' or is it the result of now using the 1700 MHz band?  Either way, it is still almost double of what the cable internet provides and well within our needs.

We have learned to live with the infrequent hiccups on some web pages. We want this to work. Problems of downloads that won't start are cured by Refreshing the page one time or more. There have also been improvements by accessing one of the router's different Wi-Fi channels. 

We have learned to live with the somewhat irregular connections to streaming services such as Hulu and Sling with performance depending on the viewing device. There are few problems using Android or Amazon Fire, but TV sets using only the, say, Samsung streaming system, can be quite buggy, but at least usable.  Sling says it's a TV compatibility issue. As before, this may depend on factors other than your internet access, but the experience is different than with the cable and DSL modems.


No comments: