T-Mobile’s newest home-broadband offering is intended to fill in when your regular ISP is on the fritz: a $30 Home Internet Backup plan.
The carrier pitches this plan, available today in its stores and via chat at its website, as an umbrella for rainy broadband days. It comes with 130GB of 5G data a month, with a free home gateway, for whenever your normal connection drops out or slows down.
For customers who already have a qualifying T-Mobile voice line, that monthly cost drops to $20 for a “limited time.”
The fine print on this offer doesn’t specify how limited that time might be. It does note that T-Mobile won’t sell Internet Backup “in all areas,” specifies a $35 “device connection charge,” clarifies that the advertised rates factor in a $10 discount for automatic payments from a bank account or debit card, and warns that exceeding 130GB will slow your connection to a nearly useless 600Kbps.
Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin flagged another wrinkle: You can't cancel service without returning the gateway, and restarting it hits you with a new device connection fee.
But people who already subscribe to T-Mobile and think they could use some backup connectivity should first consider the mobile-hotspot feature on their phones.
The cheapest postpaid plan T-Mobile sells with a full-speed hotspot—Magenta, $70 on one line but now only available over the phone or via web chat—includes 5GB of hotspot data. At the other end of the mobile-hotspot scale, Go5G Plus provides 50GB for $90 a month.
Regularly leaning on your phone’s hotspot function will put a dent in its battery life. But if you resort to any sort of T-Mobile backstop to your wired broadband that often, you might want to think about switching to T-Mobile’s 5G home internet service, which we assume is one reason why T-Mobile rolled out this new offering in the first place.
A Dramatic Growth Trajectory
The residential broadband that the carrier began selling in April 2021 and recently expanded to include a less-fixed option for RV use has done quite well, with T-Mobile reporting 5.2 million subscribers in its first-quarter earnings. But it’s also been a bright spot for Verizon and the entire US wireless industry, as a new report from Opensignal underscores.
5G home internet services, also known as fixed-wireless, "have been on a dramatic growth trajectory in the US, absorbing all broadband subscriber growth in the market since mid-2022 and amassing more than 600-700 thousand net adds per quarter,” the report states.
Wireless carriers have helped their cause by beating cable on prices, with a recent Opensignal survey finding that 74% of fixed-wireless subscribers paid under $75 a month, while 60.4% of cable subscribers could say the same.
Opensignal’s research further suggests an enormous upside for home fixed wireless among homes that previously faced local broadband monopolies.
The report cites the firm’s observations of fixed-wireless Wi-Fi networks to estimate that the share of US housing units reached by at least two broadband providers—meaning cable, fiber, or fixed-wireless—rocketed from 50% in the first quarter of 2022 to 78% in the fourth quarter of 2023, which equates to nearly 40 million more households with broadband choice.
So far, this boom in 5G residential connectivity has not bogged down the mobile 5G experience. Opensignal’s data instead show the opposite, with better mobile performance in areas with higher uptake of fixed-wireless service. The report credits that to all the fast midband 5G spectrum that T-Mobile and Verizon control—2.5GHz at the former, C-band at the latter—combined with a judicious rollout of service and network-management practices such as the soft deprioritization policy T-Mobile now applies to more intense users.
So while 5G continues to fall short of early hype about how it would power self-driving cars or robot surgery, it has enabled something else that once seemed just as improbable: empowering millions of Americans to fire their cable internet provider.