Anyone have any experience with any of the wireless home internet options?
Anyone have any experience with any of the wireless home internet options?
I have Comcast, but my deal for the last two years recently ended just in time for me to also start having hour+ long outages multiple times per week. I'm curious about my options, and specifically I wonder how viable wireless options like Verizon or T-Mobile are. Are the speeds consistent (and high) enough for video conference? Video streaming? I don't really game so I don't think latency is that important for me.
I live in the Cheesman/Cap Hill area and have one of those hideous green Verizon 5g poles right outside my building, but the eligibility checker on Verizon's site thinks it may not be in range for me somehow so I wonder how fragile it is.
I have Mint Mobile (T-Mobile) with no issues at home but I guess I'm not really stressing the throughput on my phone.
What ever you do, remember the best experience is up to you at the end of the day. You will need to make sure you have used a cell map and find out where your internet towers will be. there are sites for this. also, use a decent antenna/modem. Get the antenna high in the air and pointed in the right direction. There are sites for cheep unlimited sims and others you can get that take a dedicated 5g/4g hotpots and make it appear as an iPhone for providers. I had a two sim card modem for the best setup.
I would say the biggest downsides of wireless would be inconsistent/high latency and throttling/network congestion. Are you sure there's no fiber near you? CenturyLink or Webpass(Google Fiber) might be around. There's also Starry nearby that does point to point wireless which doesn't have the same downsides as 5G.
Yeah, the inconsistency and congestion are the main things I wonder about. I'm not that sensitive to latency, but if it's bad enough that video calls will get choppy regularly then maybe it's not worth it. I have also wondered how home internet plans get prioritized. I haven't noticed any significant performance or congestion issues on my phone on Mint/T-Mobile but I'm not pushing that connection as hard and as often as I would a home internet connection.
As far as I can tell, Starry is not available in my apartment building. They do love to send me junk mail anyway though. I think CenturyLink might be in my building, but I had an overwhelmingly negative experience with CenturyLink in Denver a while back and I'd really prefer to avoid them. Google Fiber does not look to be available in my building.
Looks like my options so far are:
- Comcast: Currently paying $60-70 (including fees) for I think 200Mbps, but I can probably call and haggle to get it down.
- CenturyLink fiber: $50 plus fees for 500Mbps. Probably plus equipment rental.
- T-Mobile: $60 flat plus a $150 cash card promo, but I can't tell if I have to buy or rent the equipment without going deeper into the process. This would be $10-20 cheaper if I also had mobile service directly from T-Mobile instead of Mint Mobile.
- Verizon: $50 probably plus fees plus a $50 Target promo card. Not sure if there are equipment fees.
I might see about trying T-Mobile since they have a trial period and I'm guessing it'd be pretty pain free since it's wireless and nobody needs to come do any installation or configuration like tends to happen with Comcast or CenturyLink. Maybe I can use that to haggle with Comcast.
I've used Comcast and CenturyLink. I would say CenturyLink, while not perfect, is miles better than Comcast. I pay $70 for gigabit: symmetric, no data cap, never had an outage, monthly contract. Only had to deal with support once when I was returning their router.
Comcast had shitty uploads, long contracts, data caps, outages, shitty support, would call me randomly trying to sell me TV plans. I had a Comcast tech cut random wires in the network closet for my building and gave me an outage when I was using Starry, they're beyond horrible.