ewams

T-Mobile 5G Internet First Speedtest
After several years of being stuck with a horrible Internet provider, I saw an advertisement for T-Mobile's 5G home Internet for $50/month with unlimited data. (Check out their page here: https://www.t-mobile.com/isp). For roughly the last two weeks I've been using it as my primary Internet and configured a little script to perform a speedtest.net test every 6 minutes.

Eager to see the results I put together the below charts. All data is from 2021-12-29 3pm through 2022-1-11 10am central. There were two outages during the testing time period, one for several hours during a power outage due to weather and the second the 5G gateway stopped serving data for roughly 20 minutes and was fixed by a reboot. The speedtest.net testing location is within the same major metro as me, roughly 45 miles away. The 5G tower my modem is connected to has line of sight, is roughly 4200 feet (1280 meters) away, and no obstructions minus the walls and siding of my home. There are two drywall walls and vinyl siding between the outside air and the modem.

So far, the experience has been very pleasant. I am still surprised by having nearly 10x better upload speeds than my current provider, which has made working from home better. Video conferences and VoIP calls work great, though I have had several issues with high latency which seem to last for 2-5 minutes but then go away for hours. This may be to being overly sensitive with something new as I did have similar issues with my existing provider (and more often!).
Streaming from all the major video providers is fantastic, including the ability to do 4k/60fps streams with no issue. Big uploads, such as sending files to Youtube or backups to Dropbox work fantastic - uploads seem to be sustained at the 40-50Mbps speed instead of burst and do roller coaster speeds.
The only negative so far, but is for more advanced users, is you are not able to do port forwarding.

I plan to continue collecting the performance stats and will create a follow up article after having 1 month of data with the T-Mobile 5G Internet.

TLDR: most common speeds were 450Mbps download and 45Mbps upload with 40ms latency.

*disclaimer* This document and charts are my own and does not represent anything from any other entity. I will not be held liable for anything bad that comes of it.

Written by Eric Wamsley
Posted: Jan 11, 2022 3:58pm
Topic: Internet
Tags: Internet,


 ©Eric Wamsley - ewams.net