It’s turning out to be a tech week. Spent some time today and yesterday unpacking and installing the new T-Mobile home Internet equipment. There have been a few surprises.

First and biggest surprise was that the T-Mobile devices aren’t just a gateway to their 5G services. I thought I would just fire up the gateway as a replacement for the Spectrum cable modem, then attach the gateway to my home wifi mesh (an Eero setup) via Ethernet. But nope, it was a little more complicated than that. The T-Mobile device is a hybrid, both a 5G gateway and a wifi router. It produces a brand new wifi network in your home. Hmmm.

Not a deal breaker. I unboxed everything, fired it up, got the documentation using the T-Mobile phone app. It took a couple of tries, but I got the gateway up and running. The new network and gateway produced 250+ Mbps download speeds and maybe 25 Mbps upload, with the gateway facing southwest through a window. Not bad. Certainly better than what I’ve been seeing with Spectrum.

Then I connected each of my devices – phone, iPad, and laptop – to the new wifi network. No problem. Next up, connecting Apple TV to the new network. That was the next problem/surprise. Apple TV simply would not recognize or connect to the T-Mobile wifi. Subsequent research leads me to believe that I may have to tune the T-Mobile device to prioritize 2.4 Ghz channels, as the Apple TV may not even recognize the higher (5 and 6 Ghz) channels that the gateway is presenting. Haven’t tried that yet, but I will. The fallback if this doesn’t work is that I keep both wifi networks operation – Eero and T-Mobile. Downside of that is a high potential for interference.

One more tweak I will likely try is an external antenna for the 5G gateway. The gateway is simply sitting inside against a west-facing window. I’m surrounded by T-Mobile cell towers on the east and west sides, but all of them are at 2-3 miles away. The eastern towers (4000ish meters away, or 2.5 miles) are blocked by some high hills, but I may have line of sight to the western towers at a greater distance of 5500 meters, or 3.5 miles. Both cases are at the extreme limit of typical cellular coverage, and that’s in clear weather. In rainy/stormy weather, our received signal will be weaker. That’s where the external antenna comes in. It can give 2-5x the signal strength, a factor I’m likely to need. But I want to prove that the system will work for me in good weather, all devices, reliably, before I invest more with an antenna.

Bottom line, so far so good with the Spectrum alternative. A bit more complicated than I would have guessed, but no show stoppers.