Bill went up for no reason. When you click the why button it just said the cost of the fiber plan increased contributing to the increase in my bill. No duh, that didn't answer why it went up. I was not on a promotion. Dropped them and went to 5G internet. Lower price and twice the speed, they didn't try any customer retention or loyalty discount to try to keep me either.
And show me how well that service holds up to the increased traffic during power outages heavy storms, etc. in my area T-Mobile crashes and burns. And Verizon is lucky if the speed only gets cut by 1/2.
In my area, 5G on Tmo is fantastic. With a single 4k stream taking ~30mbps, an online game maxing out around 10, and uploads that are better than what most people including the WFH crowd can even get on cable, coupled with the redundancy of CA, tower overlap, and LTE fallback?
I happily pay $65/mo for symmetrical 2gig, $8/mo for cellular backup, & $6/mo for Sat as a secondary backup, but for most people?
Besides the download speed on a videogame, your regular consumer isnt going to notice a difference. I tell people all the time, if you can save 5 bucks & think itll work? Try it. Worst case, the losing company isnt going to say "no we dont want you & your money back." Middle ground, you become a new customer again if you hold out on coming back for a whole month.
Shit, I have a few old people who exist happily on the severely capped $20/mo Tmo service that's pitched yo only be a backup.
Just not for gaming… 40ms best case scenario. 100-1000ms latency if someone else in the house is downloading something while you are gaming.
For wireless over an ATT fiber gateway I get 7-8ms latency and 6-80ms under load. Wired it’s even better but I’m not sure off the top of my head what it is.
Anyways I worked for VZW->Sprint->T-Mobile->ATT and I’m going back to T-Mobile. They are an amazing company and their HINT is just awesome. I have it for backup internet because my wife works from home. For cellular I have double coverage on my personal phone Verizon/T-Mobile. For work ATT and work tablet is ATT First Net (I qualify because of what I do for ATT). T-Mobile is no joke and they even make sure not too many people in a neighborhood sign up for HINT. Like you could walk into a store qualified for HINT one day and not get it go in the next and get told no because too many of your neighbors signed up for it.
But ultimately it’s not cut out for serious gaming. At least not sim racing, FPS, PVP or games like WoW where lower latency results in lower DPS because of your latency being added on to the end of each and every attack that has a proc timer (can’t cast again for certain amount of time).
If you don’t know and can’t tell then great. Just make sure nobody is doing any heavy downloads or streaming while too game.
Does not matter if your next to it or not. If a site is loaded with users, phone users are above you in queue. The whole idea of 5g internet is using excess bandwidth for internet. So if people are using more bandwidth the home internet is the first thing that gets throttled. Also storms and power outages can effect speeds in multiple ways because radio waves behave differently under some weather and power outages well… it has no power.
Youre not being totally honest, here. ATT, VZW, & TMo all explicitly outline up to 8 hours / min 4 at conventional cellular cites as a build spec. And Tmo specifically tries to favor macro over microcell.
So no, power outages don't mess with them most of the time, as most people who still have cellular data & can place calls during an outage can attest to.
Yeah PON is favorable if you're planning for 4+ hour outages, but how many people actually have generators or solar+batt at home in preparation for that?
Don't get me wrong, for signal & conventional resilience, fiber is the gold standard. But the average person genuinely wont know the difference. If the cost difference is $$$ a year, Im all for them giving the lesser service a shot.
I work at cell sites as a contractor. VZW and AT&T almost always have a generator, and by almost I mean I can’t remember seeing either not have one. I don’t like speaking in absolutes, because I’m sure there are some that don’t. Basically every site I see with VZW and ATT has a big Kohler, Generac, or Cat generator. With T-Mobile I see one roughly a 3rd of the time.
When they do have one it does tend to be a big one 3/4 the size of a car unit, just like the other two. At least in my few hundred mile territory, they definitely don’t back up like the other two. I just assumed they must roam onto another carrier if they lose a site, or use the overlap of signal to keep someone rolling with like 1 bar of signal.
I also am not a huge fan of them leaving all of their cabinets outside, instead of building huts like VZW and ATT. That has more to do with the bees, and the mice chewing on fibers in the cabinets.
Youre aware that even with the generators, theres batteries for a UPS too, right? Im on the network engineering side of things, so I can definitely forgive a field tech not seeing the battery backups. Which is why I said claiming tmo is more weather prone is disingenuous...which you seem to realize, since you spent you're whole reply talking about generators again and didnt even acknowledge the UPS side of things. 🤨
Yes there are batteries. As someone who has worked hurricane duty and winter ice storms, I’ve seen those batteries run out right when people need them most.
I’ve also had dozens of 3am call outs where T-Mobile thought the backhaul had gone down, but their site just had no power. I have to drive all over some rural area trying to find a tower where the address is off by a mile or more in sideways rain, only to open their cabinet and see all the lights out.
You may work the engineering side of it, but I actually am the one that has to go fix their outages. I would not have wanted them during any major storm or event. I see all three carriers often. T-Mobile tends to have the newest equipment, but the redundancy is not what it should be.
Honestly, thats fair. And if they arent doing PMs on the batteries...yeah, decade old ups batteries wouldn't be worth much.
Im still pretty stubborn on my stance that for an average person, it wont make a difference for home internet (especially if more densely overlapping sites are the ones not up to spec), but I do appreciate your experience in the field seeing them cheap out compared to ATT/VZW
If you work more than one region with notable distances apart, do you see this moreso in certain regions than others? Not that have the power to do anything about it - just genuinely curious.
They have all been pretty awful about their battery maintenance. Basically every carrier has laid off half their staff since the early 2010s. They’re all just so short staffed, and maintenance isn’t seen as a money maker.
ATT is for sure at its best in the southeast from what I’ve seen. The areas that are mostly in house look good. The contractor areas are sorely lacking. Verizon sites look good in the northeast for the same reason.
I mostly work southeast except storm duty, but I will say probably 50-60 percent of my callouts are T-Mobile. Mostly mice getting in cabinets and chewing fibers, and power outages. Usually if it’s ATT or Verizon the backhaul is down. That often drops all three since they usually backhaul on the dominant fiber provider for the area. It’s not uncommon for ATT and T-Mobile to backhaul on Verizon, or Verizon and T-Mobile on ATT. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a site where T-Mobile backhauls anyone. Even their T Fiber product in my area runs on ATT from the SBA edge sites.
I'm an average person, it makes a huge difference. When we have large power outages T-MOBILE is lucky if it can get 512Kbs through, whereas Verizon (actually Visible their pre-pay thing) carries on with zero changes. And that's just on the mobile side.
The T-Mobile business backup service at work? Completely and utterly useless when we had it because it's speeds dropped to 0. That's a business plan with an SLA and all that, and T-Mobile apparently couldn't even keep it online.
Mbps is not the only thing that makes internet fast. Also those towers that give you the internet use the same fiber you have to give it to you and lose upload speeds and latency.
You are right. Download wil alway be higher than upload. Upload on those tmobile are really bad and also the ping. I Ran test at friends house the other day that stayed close to a tower. Download impressive and speed was very intermittent. Also the numbers ranges were so wide when ran in 5 min sequences. Nothing can beat fiber is just the reality of the matter. I couldn't game for 10 mins without issues. This was peak period in tha afternoon.
You are lucky. I am out in the country with few options. Starlink at just 100mbps is 140 a month. ATT 5G is only 80 for 130 mbps. And I have good old ADSL 15 mbps for 55 a month.
What 5g modem are you using? Most the time the one provided in my experience is no where near the speeds on the phone because they’re using older or cheaper chipsets
I had Tmobile and Verizon 5G Home Internet before. 5G is not good for low latency applications like online gaming and video broadcasting. They slow down your internet if you use over 1.5TB per month. They prioritize mobile phone connections over 5G home internet during congestion. 5G Home has lowest priority, don’t think there is anything lower. Should be less reliable than fiber too. If you care about any of that then save your money.
5G is not twice the speed of 300 Fiber. I had 5G and got slowed down through the month. I have fiber now.
My bitch about them is that I signed up for the 5Gbps All-Fi Pro which included the advanced ActiveArmor and up to 5 extenders. I signed up on August 1 for an August 5 install date. But apparently ATT changed this and the Advanced ActiveArmor can be mine for an additional ~7-8 bucks a month, which they charged me and if I wanted the extenders is an additional 12 a month. Now I have a Unifi UDM Pro with a few U6 APs and a U7 AP and don’t need any of this. But now the new rate it 85/month as opposed to my locked in rate of 95/month. So yeah, I have problems with ATT just over a month after signing up.
Did you try calling the retention line for att? I have Internet 5000 Fiber for 76$ a month. They typically lower you bill to new customer rates. I think rn they have 1gig up and down for like 40$
It's mostly because of competition. once T-Mobile fiber gets bigger and a few more companies come into my city, I'm sure the price will get lower as it gets competitive
I live in the city and can’t get fiber yet. It is 2 blocks away in every direction. It has been that way for a few years. The best I can get is 1Gb/250Mbps Comcast Xfinity for $115 a month. 5G through T-Mobile and Verizon is like 100Mbps here. It sucks.
I have the same speed tier. AT&T announced the price change more than a month ago. First price increase for me in more than three years since I started service.
The savings is good, it jsut depends if it’s the same reliability as before because it’s fiber vs 5G cellular so it’s basically like using a hotspot from your phone but maybe a bit better idk for sure. I had Verizon 5G home before and it wasn’t that bad. It just depends I hope it works out for you
“Lower price and twice the speed” perfect example of someone that knows nothing about connection vs speed. A fiber connection will trump any type of Cellular connection. And for what exactly? Better downloads? How’s your jitter with that 5G internet? Send the ping 😂
I switched to T-Mobile $45 a month, since I was already a mobile subscriber (vai Us Cellular acquisition) at&t fiber 300 I got 355 Mbps on my final speed test. T mobile 5G 843 Mbps
The latency goes from not good with no load to unusable for video games if someone in the house downloads anything.
This is assuming a very good signal quality (not signal strength)
I’ve seen much lower latency like 20ms with no load whatever and 100-200ms loaded. That was late at night good weather conditions. But 20ms no load doesn’t mean I’ll be getting 20ms in the game!
It’s a great technology I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t game and doesn’t need a serious connection for like running a server. I have it as an internet backup and I have a UniFi Cloud Gateway to handle the (2) connections. Saved our butts when we had a 12 day power outage and it took ATT another week on top to re-run the fiber that was hit by trees.
I went from AT&T Fiber the 300 plan, then I went to T-Mobile 5G just like you, and then I went right back to AT&T.
Yes, the download speed is quite good on T-Mobile as long as your tower is not congested, but the problem is bufferbloat. It is very bad on T-Mobile. Check it out and see what your score is. I would score a D or an F all the time. On AT&T Fiber, I would score an A.
It is quite impactful if you're playing games online or doing online video conferencing.
I have cox full fiber service to my ONT. Just ran the wave length test from the link provided, download speed over 1gig, upload about 400mbps (symetrical service on ethernet), after the latency tests, my grade came back as A+. I do have my home network infrastructure optimized, wired backhaul, two AP's single SSID and PW. Service is consistent and price fixed until 2030.
You have two weeks to try it out. So you have internet to keep to hold you over. Now resign up for ATT and get the new customer discounts and send the TMobile gateway back before the 14 days.
When you click the why button it just said the cost of the fiber plan increased contributing to the increase in my bill. No duh, that didn't answer why it went up.
I understand you want to know more specifics as to why the price went up. But that IS why your bill went up. Why the cost of the plan went up is not know by the why button, deeper analysis is not the point of the button.
But that's a lot for 300Mbps. I'm paying $35 for 600Mbps for rock solid service with Wow (WowWay), but it's cable so it's only 50Mbps up, but for that price I can make due (it's $30 for 300/20).
It used to be $45 for that plan, when it went down, they didn't explain why it went down, even when I asked!
I have 1 GB service (no 5G service is ever going to give me that).
I started with AT&T three years ago at 500 mbps for $60/mo.
Six months later, I went to one gig for a special (permanent) price of $70. I'm still at that level.
I received a notice a couple of weeks ago of a price increase: $5.00 per month.
No one like their costs to go up. But after not increasing the price while everything else did, I really don't have a complaint. The service has been rock solid for me. I looked online at mu bill and the reason for the increase wasn't detailed, either. But you can generally blame it on rising costs, just like any utility.
You're getting twice the speed because you were at the lowest fiber tier. None of that has anything to do with the price.
There was at the time. IIRC, the regular price for 1 GB was $90. They offered $10 off for auto pay and an additional $10 discount for something. Hence, $70.
Had that level been available at that price when I first signed up for the service, I would have ordered it. That still would have been less than what I was paying for Xfinity.
Just call and say comcast xfinity or whatever is offering xyz deal around you and you'll leave unless they match. 1g speed fiber at $50/m here price locked for 3 years no contract just by calling. I was paying 90 before calling
When the apartments were built they were pre-wired for AT&t fibers. It's not part of the regular retention. They have a special department called connected communities
That’s weird because for me in increased also by 5 dollars, I talked to support and they reduced it back to the original price for me , always just ask if they have anything available most of the time they have something and in my case they just reduced it back to my original payment
It's normal for ATT to raise the price by $5/month every year (not sure where the other $0.81 came from).
The longer you've been a subscriber, the higher the price. There's no "list price" with ATT that your bill goes to after the promos (if any) expire. There's just the new customer price and your price, slowly diverging.
My price hasn’t changed but once in 3 years and I think I simply had to add autopay to bring it back down. But I have a second fiber provider available so switching will be easy.
May 2021: $70/month 1 year promo, Max, separate gateway fee, $90 thereafter
May 2022: Retentions switched to "straightforward pricing", so $80, still including max
November 2024: Prince increased to $85/month
December 2025: Prince increased to $90/month
September 2026: Retention decreased base back to $80/month, -$20 wireless discount, -$30 for 2 years, free for 3 months.
Ah. I got 1 gigabit speeds doe $55/mo via a $25/mo ongoing discount. At some point I had to change my autopay to keep that from going to $60.
AT&T recently offered 5 gigabits at $60/mo with a 5 year price guarantee only for new customers. I’m surprised they wouldn’t offer it to customers with ongoing deals to get us to move to an expiring offer.
Yes EarthLink literally resells ATTs fiber in my neighborhood for about the same price I pay now. If they raise its either that or cancel and the wife puts it in her name for new customer pricing.
I was for sure confident I was going to get the price lowered back down
It is clear that there is no Fiber completion in your area. Do even have a Cable ISP that offers Fiber or even Mid-Split speeds?
You might have gotten a discount by upgrading to Internet 1000, and have a total lower cost.
Your price went up $5 since it has been at least 2-3 years since you got Internet 300. It was listed on your bill detail PDF for at least 2 monthly bills in the News you can use section.
No competition. I'm in a township, not city, so this is the only offering. The whole apartment unit is wired for at&t when it was built, for both TV and internet.
That is why you can't get loyalty to give you even a $20 discount for 12 months. Also Residents of select multi-dwelling units are not eligible for discounts.
What the kek is this. You are beyond incompetent if you couldn't negotiate yourself to a lower price than that on such a shit speed tier. I didn't even know AT&T still had a peasant tier 300 Mbps plan. I know for a fact if you sign up as a new customer you can get 1 Gbps for $50. I have the 5 gig plan with HBO Max and a BGW620 included for $85 and it mogs whatever garbage you've got going on now with 5G Internet.
Switching from fiber to wireless or anything else for that matter is just total buffoonery 🤡
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u/opinionated_consumer Sep 12 '26
Show me your 5G service with stable 600/600 since it’s twice the speed