ajGoes

My finger must have bounced. I meant 150 Mbps.

tmiw

I'm not sure which of them you had exactly, but when I was looking into devices I could hook into my existing home network to serve as backup internet, I noticed that in the case of Netgear's at least, they were stuck at LTE category 4--even the newest models. This means that they only supported one LTE band at a time (e.g. no aggregation), which depending on where you're located could mean that it latches onto a band that's assigned less spectrum and/or is more crowded. That could explain a significant part of the slowness issue along with the well-known hotspot throttling that T-Mobile does.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, hotspots aren't exactly high priority for the manufacturers, so they tend to get features long after regular phones. Phones also aren't exactly designed to be hotspots 24/7, so I can see heat, etc. killing them a lot sooner.

(That all said, the 5G hotspots will likely do significantly better regardless, assuming you even have 5G in your area.)

paperwastage

if you Are tech savvy, a good outdoor antenna setup can make things go a long way too. You need technical skills to troubleshoot, and maybe some additional budget ($200 for 4x4 MIMO or directional antenna, $100-$200 router, $200-$500 for m.2 5G card?

Not sure how the pricing works though (whether you can just move the sim to the new setup )

(Example below is on band 12 lte, but explores how antenna choice can matter)
https://ltehacks.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=103

freecia

T-Mobile introduces a 5G Unlimited "Magenta Max" 40GB high speed hotspot smartphone plan. Unthrottled data to phone.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/2...ideo-announced
Press Release https://www.t-mobile.com/news/stories/magenta-max
There were better T-Mobile grandfathered data plans but this seems decent for those who want a new plan with more T-Mobile 5G hotspot capabilities. It includes Netflix perk for single plans, too.
Verizon's Visible also offers 5G for Party Pay $25/month but has some high ping times. Might not be great for gaming or web conferences/online zoom school.

GL.iNet makes a couple of travel routers which can tether the data from a phone https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt1300/ which would work with a power bank. Offloads the heat a bit and allows more devices (vs max based on carrier/phone os) & ethernet.

sushanna1

I just signed up for Tmobile internet based upon ajGoes post. I have been using a combination of a Tmobile Alcatel hotspot and my iphone SE's hotspot (Magenta Unlimited with PlusUp Data Plan) and am eager to see whether this works since the Alcatel hotspot often takes a long time to successfully turn off and internet speed varies greatly. My phone (new iphone SE) can only accommodate 4G.

ajGoes

I hope it works out for you! I figured it was worth $50 to try it. Very happy so far.

sushanna1

I successfully switched to T Mobile Internet based upon your post. So far, it has been great. Much faster than using the Alcatel T Mobile Hotspot or my phone's hotspot. And, for the first time I have internet throughout my house. Thanks so much for your review and giving me the courage to try it.

ajGoes

You're very welcome.

For others thinking of trying the T-mobile home internet gateway, note that you're only risking $50 ($55 if you don't set up automatic payments). There's no contract, so you're free to cancel after the first month if it doesn't work out.

DMSFCA

This might be the most funny/accurate way I've ever seen this described. Thanks for making me laugh today.

DMSFCA

I've seen the ads for this and have been pretty intrigued. My address comes up as available for the service, what kind of real-world speeds are you seeing with it? I have an AT&T/Netgear 5G MiFi but even when it says "5G" for the signal, 150mbit is the best I've ever seen (down, 20meg up). Not that 150 is bad at all, just curious to what your home gateways experience has been so far?

ajGoes

I've gotten as much as 150 MBps downloads and routinely get 80 or so. This is true 5G, just not the gigabit speeds you may see in limited areas.

DeafFlyer

I know this is an older thread, but we just got this Inseego 5G Mifi device. Comparing the speeds to using my iPhone 13 mini personal hotspot results show the mifi device is much faster than tethering to my phone. The phone speeds are good, but the mifi is consistently better. We’re on the Magenta Max plan. We will really put it to the test over the weekend when we try to host a zoom meeting over it. That’s only if the hotel Wi-Fi isn’t enough. One hotel had fast enough upload speeds that we didn’t need it, while another hotel does not. We bought this as a backup. I hope it works.

DMSFCA

I'm doing a corporate eval right now of the Inseego from T-Mobile. We wanted this as a small-form-factor 5G device that some road teams could use. T-Mo has a business internet deal where it's $50-ish a month for "unlimited" use. They have a home version of this (TMHI) that I'm also testing on the Nokia platform. It's a brand-new service, and there are a few things I've noticed so far:

The business service is de-prioritized. It's unlike the handset service where you have a certain allocation (i.e., 30 gigs), and then you get de-prioritized. You have the traffic shaping applied from the first packet. It might not be noticeable in some areas that don't have a lot of tower traffic. If you are in an urban neighborhood or place with a lot of traffic, you will feel this during peak periods of the day - or all the time if it's an over-subscribed area.

The business services have a (slightly) higher prioritization than the home internet. Still, when I run the Inseego using a business account alongside the Nokia running the home internet account, the Nokia beats it for speed up and down. Every time. It could be the Nokia has a better antenna array inside it. I only have low-band 5G where I'm testing, so my peak speeds are 180mbit down. If you have a mid-band where you operate, it will be faster. Not sure how it will compare in that spectrum.

The Inseego business plan does (by default) filtering on it. They block things like Netflix and what they deem "non-business" things. I called an engineer working with me on the eval, and he said that TMo thought this was a "good" thing and it's a feature enabled on the account. You can't just disable it yourself on the router. We opened up a ticket to have it disabled, and I just received a notice it was completed, but be aware. We need to do product demos for our use case and don't want to hit a filter. There was also some thought that the performance issues I was recording could be due to the filtering taking some inspection overhead. I'm not sure if DNS is doing the filtering or if they are doing some L7 inspection. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to validate how they are doing it. It would be an easy test.

sau54

This looks like a fantastic hotspot. I'm also interested, but I haven't seen any long-term in-depth review. A lot of the reviews online doesn't get into specifics and IMO, are useless. It would be even more awesome if the hotspot has the ability to add external antennas, but it doesn't seem like that's possible.

In terms of cost, how much will it be to add this to a TMO Magenta Max plan? I'm assuming TMO will charge an additional monthly fee for me being able to access the data that I'm already paying for?

DeafFlyer

I got it on a special promo (“free” for 24 months). It added just over $7 to my bill. However, it seems to say it has a 10 GB limit on data. We blew through that to about 14 GB in no time. I assume we have to pay more to get more data than that. We just got home so I haven’t called yet.

It worked great for our Zoom meeting though!