Shopping for home wireless broadband from T-Mobile will soon get a little more like signing up for its cellular service: Its mobile and home 5G will require choosing between plans.
The more interesting plan of the two new fixed-wireless offerings that T-Mobile announced Tuesday also comes in two flavors. With Away, an offshoot of the residential 5G service T-Mobile introduced in April 2021, the company invites “RVers, campers, and digital nomads” to sign up starting May 8 for broadband they can take around its US network.
The cheaper Away plan, $110 a month with autopay enabled, includes 200GB of data a month. That's a huge step up from the 50GB of mobile-hotspot use T-Mobile allots with the high-end Go 5G Next mobile plan introduced last April. The plan includes the required gateway and allows use on the road, not just while parked.
A $160 version of Away adds unlimited 5G, the first time T-Mobile has offered that to non-fixed customers. That will put the carrier into competition with Starlink Roam, the non-fixed service the SpaceX subsidiary launched as Starlink RV in May 2022 before rebranding it last March.
T-Mobile’s press release doesn't cite speeds for Away, but the federally required broadband labels for its regular Home Internet service cite typical 5G downloads ranging from 72 to 245Mbps and uploads of 15 to 31Mbps. Starlink’s label on an order page for Roam lists typical downloads of 5 to 50Mbps and uploads of 2 to 10Mbps.
For customers not looking to lead a high-tech RV lifestyle, T-Mobile’s new Home Internet Plus, available April 26, doesn’t offer faster speeds than the current plan but instead adds Wi-Fi mesh-network hardware (note that the mesh-network Wi-Fi systems we recommend start at $130) and home-network tech support by Assurant, the company known for its extended-warranty services.
Plus costs $70 a month with autopay enabled, or $20 more than the currently discounted rate for T-Mobile’s standard home internet (normally $50). Signing up for a “premium voice line” with T-Mobile cuts the cost of Plus to $50 a month.
T-Mobile does not enforce a data cap on its home internet services besides the “Internet Lite” option it sells with a 100GB cap in areas with less coverage. Still, in January the carrier outlined a policy change to deprioritize the data of its most intensive users. The fine print on Tuesday’s announcement notes that this policy will apply to them.
Fixed wireless has become one of the wireless industry’s biggest successes in the last few years, with T-Mobile and Verizon combining to poach millions of customers from incumbent providers. Last summer, AT&T joined them by offering its own Internet Air service. In PCMag’s most recent Readers’ Choice survey of the best ISPs, Verizon and T-Mobile’s home fixed-wireless services ranked sixth and seventh, with only fiber-optic broadband and Starlink placing higher.