T-Mobile 5G: An Experiment with Fixed Wireless Internet Access
In the next few weeks we’ll crest the first anniversary of Hurricane Beryl, which had quite an impact hereabouts. In the storm we lost power for a less than two days. However, our Comcast/Xfinity internet access was out for a week. As someone who works full-time from a home office, that was a problem for me. As a contract IT worker, no internet access means no money. No buénno.
My laptop, a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen7 from 2019, has the optional 4G mobile data access module. It’s part of our Mint Mobile family plan. So, at some level I can be online with just the laptop. That provides a minimal level of productivity.
Similarly, I can tether my desktop and perhaps one or two small devices to my mobile phone. That’s ok for an afternoon, but not a good solution for a week or more.
The 4G speed test on the laptop screen reflects 4G LTE access, not 5G. Also, Mint Mobile data rates are often lower than T-Mobile’s own clients. Even though T-Mobile now owns Mint, the MVNO customers are given lower priority on the network.
Then it occurred to me that all the mobile carriers had been promoting fixed wireless service in the neighborhood. In post-Beryl Houston, power was out at our home, but not too far away there was a T-Mobile store that was open for business as usual. They had a 5G fixed wireless devices for $0 with $60/month and no contract term. It seemed like potentially a good solution. At least, there was little to risk in trying it on for size.
I checked online to be sure their device would be worth the effort. I needed to have at least one Ethernet port so it could be dropped into where the cable modem normally lived. Sure enough, it had two Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi.
It took me about an hour at the store. The clerk had to initialize the device, which involved loading a T-Mobile app to my phone, then using it to setup the 5G box. That gave me the admin login for the device, as well as the built-in Wi-Fi.
Bringing the 5G device home, I put it in an east facing Window for an initial experiment. There’s a T-Mobile tower 2600 feet away, just on the other side of I-45. We know from experience that T-Mobile works well around our home.
Just using a laptop for some basic speed testing, I found the 5G service to be robust. It was markedly faster than our modest Xfinity service (50/10 Mbps.) Note that we’ve since switched to AT&T Fiber.
Swapping the 5G box for our cable modem, the whole network was back online. Most things worked, but there were some issues.
No SIP Phones
The first thing I noticed is that my SIP phones could not register over the 5G network. My various Polycom VVX phones run straight up SIP, connecting to both OnSIP and ZipDX. I expect that T-Mobile was running some application layer gateway that blocked SIP traffic.
I’m told that my phones might have worked if I was able to connect using encrypted SIP over TLS/SRTP. Unfortunately, that was not something I could readily setup.
OpenVPN
In my working day I use an OpenVPN client to connect to private ZipDX infrastructure. The 5G network device did not allow this either.
In an odd twist, I could connect to the VPN from my laptop, using the 4G radio. On this basis, I assume that there’s something about the 5G router that was causing the trouble.
VPN over 4G from the laptop was enough to allow me to work for the duration of the Xfinity outage.
Here for Good Time, Not Long Time
The T-Mobile 5G At Home device allowed me to get by for a week or so while our cable modem service was down. The ability acquire the device, and get it working quickly was nice. However, it wasn’t going to be a good long term solution. So, after sitting idle here for a few months, I returned the device and cancelled the service.
Normally, I would have a lot more to share about this experience. However, this was one of many things resulting from the derecho in May and Beryl in July. It was busy time. I was distracted by several things, including significant demand for my presentation on An Affordable Approach to Whole Home Backup Power.
Why Now?
It’s been almost a year since all of this happened. I was reminded that I should still write this up when a neighbor asked about alternatives to unreliable service from Xfinity. She’s in a condo building nearby that can’t get AT&T fiber, but she’s got a direct line of sight eastward to the T-Mobile tower. I recommended this T-Mobile 5G Fixed Wireless service as something worth trying. Presuming she doesn’t need geeky things like OpenVPN or SIP phones, it should be a good solution for her. And easy enough to back out of, if it’s not.