T-Mobile Will Shield You from Internet Outages for $30 a Month

Cable and fiber customers regularly encounter internet outages due to weather, maintenance, and other unavoidable circumstances. So, T-Mobile is introducing a Home Internet Backup plan that allows customers to utilize a 5G connection when their normal internet service goes down.

You don’t need to be a T-Mobile customer to join the Home Internet Backup plan. In fact, this service is intended for people who use a traditional ISP, such as Xfinity, AT&T, or Spectrum. The idea is pretty simple—give T-Mobile $30 a month (or $35 if you fail to set up AutoPay), and the carrier will send you a 5G router. When your ISP experiences an outage, you’re able to connect your devices to the T-Mobile router and continue browsing, working, or streaming. Those who join the Home Internet Backup plan will receive a 5G gateway at no extra cost, and T-Mobile promises a 15-minute setup process. However, there’s a $35 device connection charge that effectively acts as a setup fee.

There’s just one major drawback: you only get 130GB of 5G data each month. Once you exceed this data cap, you’re demoted to speeds of 600Kbps or less (which is practically useless). T-Mobile suggests that the average household will get seven days of internet usage before they hit the 130GB ceiling, which seems overly optimistic to me, as services like Netflix and Zoom can use more than 2GB of data each hour.

On the bright side, you probably won’t experience a seven-day-long internet outage. So, unless your whole family is chewing away at bandwidth during an internet outage (or you decide that an outage is the perfect time to download an entire TV show), the data capshouldn’tbe a problem. Just be sure to switch to your normal Wi-Fi connection after an outage ends, or unplug the 5G router when it isn’t needed.

Note that you may use your smartphone as ahotspotduring outages. The main benefit of this T-Mobile plan is that it utilizes proper home internet hardware—a router can reach devices across your home, but your phone cannot. Also, some phone plans don’t provide hotspot data.