Wireless internet providers

[Glock 40]

So a couple things I can tell you. 5g aint gonna be cheap for a while. All the new phones that do 5g are Premium devices and are over 1grand. The 5g hotspots I have seen are all over $500. Also if your out of town 5g isn't the same as in town. Yes some providers have low band 5g but it wont be much faster if any that 4g because Low band frequencies don't have the same bandwidth as the higher bands. Be careful don't go spending a bunch of money if your out of town to find out you got a 5g icon but not any discernible speed differences.

Here are couple articles about it.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-reveals-low-band-5g-secrets-explains-why-4g-can-be-faster-than-5g

https://www.howtogeek.com/428337/no...limeter-wave-low-band-and-mid-band-explained/

 

[TwoForFlinching]

Can't wait til 5g becomes the new standard. Got a taste of it in Denver. It's fast. Ridiculously fast. Was testing consistent 100mbps speeds in the congested airport over Spring Break.

 

[p238shooter]

You might look at Google FI also. 22GB/mo/phone you could teather, no contract, uses which ever of 3 carriers. Pretty big list of bring your own phones.

 

[beastep]

Thanks for the info everyone.

 

[Timmy59]

My current internet is no longer cutting it. I dont know much about this stuff so I need some advice. I currently have rise broadband and my speeds are rarely above a 1 whatever per second download. Is there anything out there that uses a cell phone service hotspot that I can use a sim card in and get service through att or tmobile or whoever and get truly unlimited internet? I use family talk from tmobile for my cell phone and I have their most unlimited plan but it still caps hotspot data to 10gb per month so another line through them wont work. I called ATT and they use a nighthawk lte mobile router but they are on back order. On amazon they are like $400. She said if I buy my own device they could set me up for $90 a month unlimited but I forgot to ask if it was truly unlimited. Are there any options Im not thinking of?

We were in the same boat a month ago, speed test just now 41.75 down 5.66 up.. You want to find out who owns the nearest tower, in our case was att so we bought this,
https://www.ebay.com/itm/AT-T-Truly...502174?hash=item2d05e6389e:g:3zcAAOSw7IpdPwd9

Almost a month and we're happy with it.. Netflix which keeps the wife entertained is performing MUCH better, no more dropping out and buffering is 8-13% and then the program is on..

 

[John6185]

What Timmy59 mentions sounds pretty good for the price and speed. I'm paying $109.00 per month for Cox and it's getting old. That's over $1300 per year as compared to $800 annually. Timmy59, tell us more, is it as good as the advertiser says? Will rates go up? Do you pay ATT? Folks in the far country could sure use this.

 

[918evo]

The rates have gone up, so there is no guaranty they won't go up again. You are not paying ATT directly, so there is no rate-lock/grandfather clause-deal going on. You go the the seller's website(middleofnowhereinternet.com) and pay by the month or pay by the year. It is a service that operates in a grey area by bypassing data throttling, so it may get shut down eventually. I would never give up Cox to jump aboard, but it is a viable option for the rural folk.

 

[beastep]

How do i find out who has the nearest tower? If someone with an att phone does an internet speed test from inside my house wouldnt that be comparable speeds to an att router like the one were talking about?

 

[dennishoddy]

How do i find out who has the nearest tower? If someone with an att phone does an internet speed test from inside my house wouldnt that be comparable speeds to an att router like the one were talking about?

There are a couple of apps you can load on your phone to find out who owns the nearest tower. Im on IPhone.

Open Signal is one app.
Find Tower is another app.

 

[NightShade]

You can also look up towers in an area here. https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/AsrSearch/asrRegistrationSearch.jsp

The only thing you have to do is figure out who's equipment is where. One tower can hold multiple carriers and the owner could be the carrier themselves or a private owner who leases out space.

I am actually using Google Fi, https://g.co/fi/r/PTYJ9R if you use that and sign up you get 20 bucks off the first month. They have "unlimited" plans that can get pretty cheap with multiple people and you can actually have google split the payment in a way. Basically one person "pays" the bill and then the other people pay them back through google's payment system. I actually have the regular plan where you pay for your data up to 60 per month after which it's basically unlimited to a point. I have never went over 2GB so no clue on anything else there. I know that they automatically connect my phone to all of the different cable company hotspots you normally can only use when you have service and log in. The one thing I have read about Google Fi is that once it gets to a certain point of data it basically drops to 2G and is useless. You can get back to full speed but you have to pay for more data at 10 per Gigabyte so it will not be the best option for home use, they are an MVNO so they have to pay someone else for the usage somehow.

I previously had T-mobile and a couple years ago while sitting in OKC nearly got 100 download speeds, 5G will be nice but until more competition is available for which phones you can use do drive their cost down I have no need to even worry about it. I will say that if you have a Google Fi compatible phone that is 5G it is supposed to work.

I only found a couple cell modems that were 5G and they are about 650 on their own. The advantage of using one of the ones where you build your own or they are of similar design is that you can swap out the cell modem to a faster design later on like upgrading the cpu on a computer, get the cheap one now and then upgrade. All 4G devices have a LTE category they fall in to. https://www.cablefree.net/wirelesstechnology/4glte/lte-ue-category-class-definitions/ gives a lot of information about it. Anyway for most people Category 3 or Category 4 are fine, Category 6 is great and Category 12 is overkill in most area's and there is a category 20 which is 2Gbps download and is overkill since you will probably have a faster connection to the tower than it has to the internet. https://ltefix.com/product-category/modems/ can give you an idea of everything available if you have some DIY skills, if you search around for a particular product you may be able to find it for less.