Rural Internet (Part 2)

A late entrant into the rural home internet game: T-Mobile LTE Home Internet

Looks good in theory: $50 a month, “truly” unlimited, up to 50 Mbit/sec. It’s GPS locked to your address so you can’t use it as a mobile hotspot.

So far it’s not living up to the promise. There’s a T-Mobile tower under 4 miles from me with a clear line of sight. But the signal strength is poor; only two bars from my office and four for a good signal in the front of the house.

I’m getting about 12 Mbit/sec with the good signal and about 4 Mbit/sec with the poor signal. A lot of ping jitter and evidence of traffic deprioritization due to network congestion.

There’s no external antenna connector on it either, so I’m stuck with whatever signal I can get inside the house.

I installed the modem in the dining room at the front of the house and hooked up a TP-Link power line adapter to run an ethernet connection back to my office area where I hooked it up to a Google WiFi base station.

It works, but the quality of the connection is variable. During the weekday it’s not too bad; I can get nearly 20 Mbit/sec. But after 5PM – and on weekends – it drops off sharply. And ping times are all over the place; ranging from 35ms to a high of 530ms.

Eventually I dispensed with the power line adapter and just kept the modem on top of of a plastic file cabinet in my office near a window with a good line-of-site to the T-Mobile tower and that worked well enough for a few years until the ultimate solution to our internet problem got to us.