T-Mobile could be your new ISP—if you move quickly. The company today officially launched its 5G home internet service, saying it will make speeds of up to 100Mbps available to 30 million households, about a quarter of the US population.
“We’re able to officially commercially bring meaningful connectivity to millions of Americans,” said Dow Draper, T-Mobile’s EVP of emerging products. “Most customers will experience average speeds over 100Mbps.”
The company has been offering a limited “pilot” service, mostly on 4G, for a year now. The company also previously launched a 5G internet service for businesses. This is the official, broader commercial launch of T-Mobile’s 5G home service.
Americans are desperate for broadband competition. The US Census’ American Community Survey shows that 29% of US households lack broadband service, and the Biden administration just proposed a $100 billion plan to expand broadband access. While much of the discussion around the digital divide has focused on extending new access to rural areas, there’s a huge urban problem as well. The Texas TribuneTexas Tribune reports that Texas’ six biggest urban counties have more than 590,000 households without internet subscriptions, largely because of affordability.
T-Mobile’s service will cost $60/month, with taxes, fees, and the home modem hardware included. There are no contracts, and you self-install the equipment.
That makes T-Mobile’s option much more affordable than buzzy competitor Starlink, which charges $99/month plus $499 for its base station. Draper said there’s room for both in an ISP market starved for choice.
“I think there’s a pretty significant cost difference, a pretty significant availability difference, and there are a lot of homes out there where these things are needed,” he said. “I see [Starlink] as an additive.”
The system will be available to people who have T-Mobile 5G coverage where there is sufficient excess capacity to handle home users without slowing down the mobile network, Draper said. Of the first 30 million households eligible, 20 million will be in urban and suburban areas, and 10 million will be rural, he said. You can check coverage at tmobile.com/isp.
Verizon is also rolling out a wireless home internet product, but only aims to cover 30 million households by 2023, giving T-Mobile a significant head start.
Available Only While Supplies Last
T-Mobile will take subscribers on a first-come, first-served basis until capacity runs out, and then will add subscribers as it adds capacity, Draper said.
With wired internet systems, if the line goes to your house, the company offers you service. That’s not the case with wireless systems like this one, or Verizon’s and Starlink’s wireless ISP services. Rather, they have to balance expected home users’ usage with their network capacity and, in T-Mobile’s and Verizon’s cases, mobile phone usage. So T-Mobile will sign up a certain number of people in a neighborhood, wait, add some more network capacity if it can, and repeat.
The service is truly unlimited. Draper said the network is planned for homes using “several hundreds to the high hundreds of gigabytes per month” of data. People using more won’t be penalized, but it sounds like extremely heavy use would cut down on the ability of other people to sign up.
Quality of service will be a big question. Wired internet subscribers are used to solid, continuous bandwidth. Mobile wireless networks fluctuate much more than wired ones do, because they deal with changing congestion from mobile phone users wandering in and out of the cell.
On Twitter, YouTuber TechLifeChannel tells me that users of the existing pilot program have had issues with service quality and customer support. Draper noted that while the pilot program often used 4G modems, the official launch will only use 5G devices and only sell into areas with sufficient capacity.
“We know the capacity constraints and limitations,” Draper said. “We are focusing on areas where we have ample capacity so we can manage this.”
In the future, a 5G feature called network slicing will let 5G providers more easily set aside airwaves to guarantee home internet service quality, but that feature hasn’t been fully implemented yet.
The company plans to have 7-8 million subscribers by 2025. That will still make it a smaller ISP than the biggest cable companies. Comcast had around 29 million ISP subscribers in 2019, according to Statista, while Charter had 26.6 million and AT&T had about 15.4 million.
There’s another gating factor, too. Draper said that the global chipset shortage has limited T-Mobile’s supply of 5G modems. Their suppliers have been fulfilling their orders, but if demand blows up for the ISP service, T-Mobile may not be able to get extra modems quickly, he said.
“It’s going to constrain us from growing faster than we expect,” Draper said. “Just be patient with us. If more demand comes in, we’re going to have to roll with this and manage customer expectations.”
Getting Out Into the Country
T-Mobile’s push into rural America means convincing a lot of people who don’t think that the carrier’s network will work for them. Along with opening new, combined T-Mobile/Metro stores in rural areas, the company will hire 2,500 “hometown experts” in places that don’t have the population density to support a store, said Jon Freier, T-Mobile’s EVP of consumer markets. These folks will work from home, empowered to sell and support T-Mobile products in a rural community, and they’ll make house calls.
“Hometown experts are effectively the extension of a store,” Freier said.
I saw T-Mobile’s rural challenge on a drive yesterday between Ithaca and Skeneatles, in upstate New York. Along the 42-mile, one-hour drive, which did not pass through any parks or protected areas, I had no usable T-Mobile signal 40% of the time, and AT&T was on 3G. Verizon was the only carrier with LTE coverage. CellMapper.net shows the situation, with a big gap between T-Mobile cell sites.
Moving into smaller communities where T-Mobile is just becoming viable will give the network team needed feedback, Freier said.
“There’s only so much the national team can do when it comes to local coverage. We need to get the information from the people who live in these communities and towns,” he said. “Local employees and a local distribution team to push on the company—that’s a kind of forcing function that I’m going to welcome.”
