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After years of not having a dedicated internet connection, I finally found something that works.

T-Mobile Home Internet

We are too far back from the main road to get cable, unless we wanted to pay the cable company to install a repeater and a quarter mile of line.

Satellite wasn’t really an option, because that’s download only and you need a landline for uploads, and we don’t have a landline. We have a home phone, but it’s through cell service.

We checked about DSL, but that wasn’t available, nor is fiber optic.

We used to have a dedicated hotspot from AT&T, back when it was a family share plan. It worked fine, but it had a data cap with overage charges if we went past the cap. That wasn’t much of a problem until about two years ago.

So we switched from the family share plan to the unlimited plan, which gave us more data on our phones and was a cheaper plan (even without factoring in the overage charges) but we were not allowed to keep the dedicated hotspot.

We survived by using the hotspot capabilities of our phones. That was fine, but it hastened the demise of my iPhone 5’s battery. But that was easily replaced (the battery, not the phone), and then our local library helped out by doubling their number of free mobile hotspots. We could check out a hotspot for two weeks at a time, and that was especially helpful this last spring when the schools switched to remote learning, and this fall when they resumed classes remotely. And for my job being work-from-home too. The last couple months we’ve had up to 5 people in online meetings at the same time. The library hotspot is okay but it wasn’t that good to keep up with that many devices, and its range wasn’t that good. It’s that little hotspot thingy about the size of a deck of cards.

Then, after a visit back to the family farm a couple weeks ago, my brother encouraged me to try AT&T fixed wireless. It’s what they use in their rural area, but it requires the service provider to setup special equipment, both at the cell tower and at the home. So they only put the equipment at the cell tower if there are enough people in the area to warrant it.

I checked online and AT&T fixed wireless is not an option.

I then checked Verizon because I had seen their commercials. They have a wireless home internet option for people like me, but it’s not available in my area. But I clicked on the option that said I was interested, so they’d be encouraged to add the service here.

I had looked into mobile hotspots from Sprint last year, but they were not helpful because I didn’t have a cell phone plan with them.

Going down the list of cell services, I tried T-Mobile. They had a home internet service, which was invitation-only, but some things online said it was opened up to everyone. With nothing to lose, I went to the T-Mobile site and clicked the link to sign up. They said service was available in my area! But then they said I had a call them to setup the service.

That had me confused. A cell phone company with a website to be able to check for service in my area but not able to let me buy the thing didn’t quite make sense.

That was late that day though, so I left it until the next day. In the morning though, they called me and left me a voicemail. Yes, I was approved and they’d like to get me going with the home internet service. So I called them back and went through a lot of questions, mostly related to my credit worthiness. This lady also said I was lucky to have gotten an invitation, but she never asked for any invitation info – she just saw that I was approved and that was that.

A couple days later, the home internet box arrived on my front porch. I plugged it in, the lights turned green, and it worked.

At that point, there had been no charges on my credit card and no email from T-Mobile welcoming me or even acknowledging my existence.

Even now, a few days into the service, I got no communication from T-Mobile about my account.

The home internet box uses their cell signal but it’s a more powerful box, about half the size of a toaster. It has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, and they’re both more powerful than the free library hotspot. The kids were pleasantly surprised by the extra speed of the 5GHz band. And if it ends up not being good enough everywhere, there are ethernet jacks on the box to which I could connect an extra router.

The only problem I’ve had so far with the home internet box is that it doesn’t like FTP. My FTP client just gives errors. As soon as I fire up my phone tether hotspot or the library hotspot and connect the laptop to that, the FTP client is happy. I have not checked Archie or Gopher yet.

Overall though, it’s much better than having to go to the library every two weeks for a new hotspot. They won’t let those be renewed, so we’d have to take it in and hope they had another one ready to go. Sometimes we’d have to wait a few days for someone else to turn one in. Apparently we aren’t the only people in the area with this problem.

For $50 a month, it’s worth it. At least I hope it’s $50, I’ll find out once I get a bill or something from T-Mobile.

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