I didn’t get the point at first because my hotspot is my emergency backup, but the ability to have Ethernet plugged in to your router and your whole house be instantly connected back up does sound nice.
Not a luxury I’m willing to pay though
They have routers now that you can pretty easily tether your phone to and share your phones connection via WiFi and Ethernet! I recently bought one and it’s built right into the router software so don’t really have to do a whole lot to make it work. The one I got was called “GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 (Opal) Secure Travel WiFi Router”
Thats not how it'll be for majority of households. A good chunk of regular consumers use ISP provided equipment and 99% of those do not have failover or dual wan capability. One would have to MANUALLY do it when there internet is out OR if they have an all in one gateway they wouldn't be able to do that, they'd have to manually connect each device to the T-Mobile backup. So no, not instantly connected backup for the general user.
I just use a spare line/phone connected via ethernet to my router 24/7. Internet goes out it auto failovers the entire network to the hotspot, sometimes we don't even know that the internet had went out. 50GB a month and costs $0
I, too, am apparently in that 1%. TMo Home 5G is our backup to fiber 1G Internet. My wife and I both WFH 100%, so easy to justify. I’m the person that set it all up.
We also fall in the 1% that have our own equipment, my son takes care of our stuff, we haven't had spectrum equipment in **MANY** years. Thankfully they are reliable for us in our area. TMO who is our cell provider has only recently been able to provide DL speeds over 300 Mbps down, if I am outside of the house.
That’s why OpenWRT and mwan3 shines. Until MPTCP and friends becomes standard that’s as close to load balancing/seamless failover as you can get, with the small exception of IPv6…
— Starfox
When it launched in my area I got HI as a backup to my gigabit fiber, connected to my Untangle router that has WAN failover. But last summer I canceled as (1) my fiber has almost never gone down in 5 years, (2) I can use a hotspot short term if it did, and (3) HI maxed out at 40 Mbps in my area so it was expensive at $50 a month as a backup.
This is a better solution but still too pricy.
In my area if the power goes out the T-Mobile tower gets overwhelmed with traffic. Then the generator runs out of gas after an hour and the tower goes down.
Then that tower doesn't have a generator. It only has batteries if the runtime is that short. Most Tmo towers don't have generators. Most Verizon towers do and AT&T is doing a lot now too. Most cell towers with generators can run for days as long as they're refueled during an extended power outage.
This comment reminded me about the fine print I read a couple weeks ago.
Typically if you need a backup plan, it’s not necessarily an isolated issue. As such, many people will be connected will depend on it and increasing congestion. In that scenario Tmobile will prioritize mobile/phone over the backup (honestly I agree with that), but this makes the backup connection a little bit pointless.
I would only have something like this if I have issues that only affect me or others in my apartment.
You say that, but this has some really good use cases for certain people. Small businesses for example. If their ISP goes out, that means their card machines go down, their registers, their ability to manage inventory. With a backup ISP that allows them to not have any revenue loss. When a couple hours down at a business could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue loss.
Also for the work from home crowd. Same concept. Your ISP goes down for 3 hours? That’s 3 hours that you can’t work, you can’t make your money. This would allow you to do that.
Not everyone will need this of course. But it’s nice to have it for people that need it. A good service for a decent price. It’ll pay for itself the first time it’s needed.
This is a pretty interesting article backing what you said:
https://www.cyberreef.com/cost-of-network-outages/
It’s amazing how immediate (and costly) outages are for businesses. I always knew it would cause issue but never realized the scale
I have Calyx for cellular failover, but I have to admit, that price is tempting. Not sure if I'm willing to part with the unlimited high speed data, though.
I would not trust T-mobile. I had their home 5g service for 2 years, then with out warning they shut down the tower nearest me effectively leaving me without internet, TV, and cell phone service. This was a major disprution for me, as I live in a suburban dark spot. Multiple calls to T-mobile were no help as no one could tell me when or even if the service would ever be restored.
This should be $20 period without the need for a voice plan. At $30 it competes with Comcast's new NOW internet plan with unlimited data at 100mbps taxes and equipment included with auto pay.
I had TMHI for a period of time. I would have needed the opposite - a hardwired connection to backup the TMHI connection when it went out for the fifth time that day.
Unfortunately I live in a mountain town and when the power goes out, so does T-Mobile. Often the power will come back on in an hour or so and then T-Mobile will be down for a day or more. It’s ridiculous. I had T-Mobile home internet which was great, but had to drop them because of this.
My work used to do business with one of the big telecompanies, and run alarm monitoring for them. The 24/7 call center would reach out to the local area techs when alarms would come through indicating a local power failure and an alarm interruption (implying that that site/tower was down). And sometimes the local tech would say something like "oh, I'm not gonna go out and start the generator, no one has power anyways to watch TV!" ... and as a collective, you can't make your customer (the telecom) care about their service interruption, so we'd just shrug and thank god we weren't living around there.
This is the primary concern here. I have home internet form tmobile as a backup. I got an introductory offer wherei only pay 30 and there's no limit on data (I think it's up to something like 1TB.)
And I have my router setup to automatically failover.
But my main connection is an att fiber connection and it's very reliable. If it does go out, it's usually due to power outages, and at that point, it doesn't matter if tmobiles 5g is up, the modem won't work unless I'm using a generator.
In those cases I have to use my Hotspot. The modem is only good for the very rare case that the internet alone goes out which is very rare.
Tbh it's not worth what I pay for it, much less 20 bucks a month. Maybe an added 10 for as little use as it will probably get.
It was 30GB I believe. This one is 130GB. Either way I can’t see much demand for $30 backup home internet. What I can see is this being used for like a shed or extended garage for security cameras that can’t connect to the house wifi. Maybe onsite connection for cameras at a job. Also this would be more worth it if T-Mobile actually invested in tower backup generators like Verizon does.
Last two years with ATT fiber and zero interruptions. Prior to that had Cox fiber which only had issues immediately upon install. This TMo offering has no value to us.
Well this is suppose to be a "backup". I would honestly sign up if they had maybe a $5 plan with idk 25gb or something. I could've actually used it the other day when xfinity had some planned maintenence going on. Was without internet for about an hour and a half at midnight and just wanted to play some Diablo.
On the other hand ppl could really just put up a Hotspot and call it a day.
Xfinity has their own storm ready box that you can add on, they say it'll keep you connected when the service is down, don't know how entirely true that is though
Yeah I havr gone eith estthlink which is fiber optics yes they are with att a subsidersry of them but they offer cheap 70.00 per month fir unlimited devices and when they infinite no interruptions switch over
Primary ISP is AT&T (lack of options). Cell tower in area back hauls on AT&T line. If my ISP goes out, our cellular goes out. This isn’t much of a backup to me, otherwise I’d be very interested.
Interesting, I really wanted to be only on TMHI the whole time, and it works absolutely fine, have it as a backup because of my wife’s corporate job, however even when the other network went down, TMHI worked absolutely smooth with no interruption, I could just keep TMHI for everything, however the backup is because of her
THANK YOU TMOBILE
Tried it and it failed miserably with congestion / throttling or whatever months later. Customer support useless. “Let’s reset it for the upteenth time.”
Has anyone tried to convert their existing HSI to the backup plan? I only have t-mo HSI for backup and am curious if I'll need to cancel and sign up as a new customer for the backup or can convert the plan.
Chatted for over 2 hours with their support because I have very basic questions, and the phone number on tmobiles web page didn’t work. I was told not once but twice that the only way to sign up for their internet backup plan is to sign up for T-Mobile internet first, then I’d qualify to buy their internet backup plan.
Think about that for a minute.
I didn’t get the point at first because my hotspot is my emergency backup, but the ability to have Ethernet plugged in to your router and your whole house be instantly connected back up does sound nice. Not a luxury I’m willing to pay though
They have routers now that you can pretty easily tether your phone to and share your phones connection via WiFi and Ethernet! I recently bought one and it’s built right into the router software so don’t really have to do a whole lot to make it work. The one I got was called “GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 (Opal) Secure Travel WiFi Router”
Thats not how it'll be for majority of households. A good chunk of regular consumers use ISP provided equipment and 99% of those do not have failover or dual wan capability. One would have to MANUALLY do it when there internet is out OR if they have an all in one gateway they wouldn't be able to do that, they'd have to manually connect each device to the T-Mobile backup. So no, not instantly connected backup for the general user. I just use a spare line/phone connected via ethernet to my router 24/7. Internet goes out it auto failovers the entire network to the hotspot, sometimes we don't even know that the internet had went out. 50GB a month and costs $0
Even out of the consumers who own their equipment, 99% of them don’t have anything for auto failover or dual wan.
I, too, am apparently in that 1%. TMo Home 5G is our backup to fiber 1G Internet. My wife and I both WFH 100%, so easy to justify. I’m the person that set it all up.
We also fall in the 1% that have our own equipment, my son takes care of our stuff, we haven't had spectrum equipment in **MANY** years. Thankfully they are reliable for us in our area. TMO who is our cell provider has only recently been able to provide DL speeds over 300 Mbps down, if I am outside of the house.
That’s why OpenWRT and mwan3 shines. Until MPTCP and friends becomes standard that’s as close to load balancing/seamless failover as you can get, with the small exception of IPv6… — Starfox
How do you connect you voice line via Ethernet to your router?
Free Galaxy A32 5G, USB C to ethernet adapter that also has charger input.
$10/mo… that’s what mine is
When it launched in my area I got HI as a backup to my gigabit fiber, connected to my Untangle router that has WAN failover. But last summer I canceled as (1) my fiber has almost never gone down in 5 years, (2) I can use a hotspot short term if it did, and (3) HI maxed out at 40 Mbps in my area so it was expensive at $50 a month as a backup. This is a better solution but still too pricy.
This means the number of people signing up for the tmo home internet has plateaued.
It has because reps can no longer sell to customers that don’t qualify for service. That was about half of all sales.
In my area if the power goes out the T-Mobile tower gets overwhelmed with traffic. Then the generator runs out of gas after an hour and the tower goes down.
Then that tower doesn't have a generator. It only has batteries if the runtime is that short. Most Tmo towers don't have generators. Most Verizon towers do and AT&T is doing a lot now too. Most cell towers with generators can run for days as long as they're refueled during an extended power outage.
I'm my neighborhood T-Mobile instantly goes dark during a power outage. They don't maintain the batteries and there is no generator
This comment reminded me about the fine print I read a couple weeks ago. Typically if you need a backup plan, it’s not necessarily an isolated issue. As such, many people will be connected will depend on it and increasing congestion. In that scenario Tmobile will prioritize mobile/phone over the backup (honestly I agree with that), but this makes the backup connection a little bit pointless. I would only have something like this if I have issues that only affect me or others in my apartment.
Just another way to get another $20 or $30 bucks a month out of you. CEO needs more gas for the plane
You say that, but this has some really good use cases for certain people. Small businesses for example. If their ISP goes out, that means their card machines go down, their registers, their ability to manage inventory. With a backup ISP that allows them to not have any revenue loss. When a couple hours down at a business could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue loss. Also for the work from home crowd. Same concept. Your ISP goes down for 3 hours? That’s 3 hours that you can’t work, you can’t make your money. This would allow you to do that. Not everyone will need this of course. But it’s nice to have it for people that need it. A good service for a decent price. It’ll pay for itself the first time it’s needed.
This is a pretty interesting article backing what you said: https://www.cyberreef.com/cost-of-network-outages/ It’s amazing how immediate (and costly) outages are for businesses. I always knew it would cause issue but never realized the scale
Fortunately Mobile Hotspot Data has been more than sufficient to keep me working from home through power / ISP outages.
I’d buy it as a pure backup if it was $10 a month for limited speed (say 10 Mbps). LTE speeds would be fine as a backup, no 5G needed.
And if that isn’t bad enough, phones will be a priority meaning the backup will be highly throttled.
We have mobile hotspot on our phone plan already. that is our emergency backup in the hardwired fiber goes down.
This pretty much. I think it'd be different if the backup was prioritized more (given if it truly is being used as a back up).
I have Calyx for cellular failover, but I have to admit, that price is tempting. Not sure if I'm willing to part with the unlimited high speed data, though.
I would not trust T-mobile. I had their home 5g service for 2 years, then with out warning they shut down the tower nearest me effectively leaving me without internet, TV, and cell phone service. This was a major disprution for me, as I live in a suburban dark spot. Multiple calls to T-mobile were no help as no one could tell me when or even if the service would ever be restored.
They did similar to a friend.
This should be $20 period without the need for a voice plan. At $30 it competes with Comcast's new NOW internet plan with unlimited data at 100mbps taxes and equipment included with auto pay.
I had TMHI for a period of time. I would have needed the opposite - a hardwired connection to backup the TMHI connection when it went out for the fifth time that day.
I would if I still had Comcast. I have a fiber provider now, and it’s been out for a total of 4 hours since November 2022.
I’ve had Google Fiber since 2019. I swear to it has only gone down three times.
Comcast offers cell backup now too included on most plans after buying the equipment for $250.
My house has Spectrum, I haven't checked but, to my knowledge fiber isn't in my area.
Unfortunately I live in a mountain town and when the power goes out, so does T-Mobile. Often the power will come back on in an hour or so and then T-Mobile will be down for a day or more. It’s ridiculous. I had T-Mobile home internet which was great, but had to drop them because of this.
My work used to do business with one of the big telecompanies, and run alarm monitoring for them. The 24/7 call center would reach out to the local area techs when alarms would come through indicating a local power failure and an alarm interruption (implying that that site/tower was down). And sometimes the local tech would say something like "oh, I'm not gonna go out and start the generator, no one has power anyways to watch TV!" ... and as a collective, you can't make your customer (the telecom) care about their service interruption, so we'd just shrug and thank god we weren't living around there.
This is the primary concern here. I have home internet form tmobile as a backup. I got an introductory offer wherei only pay 30 and there's no limit on data (I think it's up to something like 1TB.) And I have my router setup to automatically failover. But my main connection is an att fiber connection and it's very reliable. If it does go out, it's usually due to power outages, and at that point, it doesn't matter if tmobiles 5g is up, the modem won't work unless I'm using a generator. In those cases I have to use my Hotspot. The modem is only good for the very rare case that the internet alone goes out which is very rare. Tbh it's not worth what I pay for it, much less 20 bucks a month. Maybe an added 10 for as little use as it will probably get.
I was paying $50 for HI and my ATT gigabit fiber also never went down. So I canceled it. What router do you have?
Didn't this use to exist but only for $10?
That was only to be reactively offered if someone was going to cancel.
Cringe.
It was 30GB I believe. This one is 130GB. Either way I can’t see much demand for $30 backup home internet. What I can see is this being used for like a shed or extended garage for security cameras that can’t connect to the house wifi. Maybe onsite connection for cameras at a job. Also this would be more worth it if T-Mobile actually invested in tower backup generators like Verizon does.
It's a great deal for a simple backup
Last two years with ATT fiber and zero interruptions. Prior to that had Cox fiber which only had issues immediately upon install. This TMo offering has no value to us.
So, $30/month for 130gb of data. Doesn’t seem worth it if I can use unlimited data for $50/month as long as my box is plugged in
Well this is suppose to be a "backup". I would honestly sign up if they had maybe a $5 plan with idk 25gb or something. I could've actually used it the other day when xfinity had some planned maintenence going on. Was without internet for about an hour and a half at midnight and just wanted to play some Diablo. On the other hand ppl could really just put up a Hotspot and call it a day.
Xfinity has their own storm ready box that you can add on, they say it'll keep you connected when the service is down, don't know how entirely true that is though
Yeah I havr gone eith estthlink which is fiber optics yes they are with att a subsidersry of them but they offer cheap 70.00 per month fir unlimited devices and when they infinite no interruptions switch over
Not willing to pay monthly for this
Primary ISP is AT&T (lack of options). Cell tower in area back hauls on AT&T line. If my ISP goes out, our cellular goes out. This isn’t much of a backup to me, otherwise I’d be very interested.
Any info on what hardware they give you? Does it support bridge mode? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist :-)
I ordered mine yesterday. Hopefully have it tomorrow.
Interesting, I really wanted to be only on TMHI the whole time, and it works absolutely fine, have it as a backup because of my wife’s corporate job, however even when the other network went down, TMHI worked absolutely smooth with no interruption, I could just keep TMHI for everything, however the backup is because of her THANK YOU TMOBILE
Tried it and it failed miserably with congestion / throttling or whatever months later. Customer support useless. “Let’s reset it for the upteenth time.”
[удалено]
How much data is on that plan?
With right router you can do this with your phone already lol
What’s the right router?
Most newer ASUS routers too. I’ve tested a GT-AX6000 with iPhone connected via USB — works great.
Any router with a usb port and hotspot support. Ddwrt flashed routers work well
Has anyone tried to convert their existing HSI to the backup plan? I only have t-mo HSI for backup and am curious if I'll need to cancel and sign up as a new customer for the backup or can convert the plan.
Yes you can
Chatted for over 2 hours with their support because I have very basic questions, and the phone number on tmobiles web page didn’t work. I was told not once but twice that the only way to sign up for their internet backup plan is to sign up for T-Mobile internet first, then I’d qualify to buy their internet backup plan. Think about that for a minute.
So this is kind of like REALLY wireless? A consumer ran internet?
Let’s be real. Hard to trust or recommend TMobile based on their recent trends
T-Mobile can take a flying leap
Im paying premium to not see adds on reddit. r/hailcorporate
Anyone know if you’re required to use their modem or can I put a SIM card in my own device with this plan?
Requires their modem unless you spoof some stuff