AT&T 5G cellular home internet - first impressions

[jtbell]

For about 16 years, our home internet service has been via DSL, piggybacked onto our AT&T landline phone service. It's very slow, only 0.75 Mbps down. Apparently AT&T's infrastructure in our part of town doesn't support faster DSL.

Until a few years ago, the main alternative was the local cable TV monopoly, Spectrum. However, we've never used cable TV, because an antenna gives us enough TV. We didn't want to mess with having a cable connection installed, or deal with Spectrum.

Recently, AT&T introduced their "Internet Air" service in our area. It uses a combined 5G cellular gateway and Wi-Fi router. After receiving repeated mail invitations to upgrade to it, we took the plunge. The gateway/router arrived three days ago.

This unit is apparently a new model, as of last month. Its egg-shaped predecessor still shows up in most or all references online, even on AT&T's own website. It has a couple of Ethernet ports on the back. I easily added it to our powerline Ethernet network that uses house wiring instead of dedicated network cables. It basically takes the place of our old DSL modem and our Wi-Fi adapter.

In the picture, you can see a powerline Ethernet adapter on the wall below the gateway's power module. It was formerly connected to our Wi-Fi adapter (an Apple Airport Express unit).

I didn't need to reconfigure any of the devices on the powerline network. I did of course need to join our iPhones and iPads to the new Wi-Fi network.

So far we're happy with the results. With the old DSL setup, I could download about 5 Mbytes per minute (300 Mbytes per hour) to my iMac. Now I get about 4 to 6 Mbytes per second. I don't know yet whether the limiting factor is the 5G cellular or the powerline Ethernet.

 

[scottdave]

We just added one of these at our business as a backup. We were on Comcast for our internet, phones and TV, but the price kept rising. In March we switched to AT&T fiber optic and were impressed with the speed increase. In July a truck snagged the AT&T fiber line and we were down for 2.5 days. We were using a cell phone as a hotspot to get by. When they said this air thing was available, I jumped on the opportunity.

 

[jtbell]

In July a truck snagged the AT&T fiber line and we were down for 2.5 days. We were using a cell phone as a hotspot to get by. When they said this air thing was available, I jumped on the opportunity.

Very much the same thing happened to us. The day after I left on a solo road trip last month, my wife reported that our phone line from the utility pole at the street had come down. She scheduled an appointment for someone to come out and fix it. Then the linemen's union (CWA) went on strike against AT&T in the Southeast. So she had to use her iPhone for everything, and I had to do likewise with mine after I returned home. It prompted us to investigate AT&T's 5G internet, as well as T-Mobile's. Verizon doesn't offer it in our area yet.

Finally, the day after I set up the 5G gateway, and a month after the phone line came down, an AT&T manager came out and put the phone line back up. He said it had probably been snagged by a truck.

Next week, Apple is releasing MacOS 15 (Sequoia). That should give our new gateway a workout. Previous major MacOS upgrades have been about 12 GB or so, which was completely impractical with our old DSL service. I had to take a MacBook to the college where we used to work and still have access to their network, download the installer there, put it on a USB stick, and bring it back home to install on my iMac.

 

[jtbell]

I've now switched the iMac to use Wi-Fi from the gateway instead of the powerline Ethernet. Download speeds are definitely faster overall, up to about twice as fast (10-12 Mbytes/sec). It varies, even for the same download site, probably depending on how much traffic the cell tower is carrying.

I've done some app updates (Photoshop, Microsoft 365) which go a lot faster than with the old DSL connection, a few minutes versus a few or several hours. I haven't done the MacOS Sequoia upgrade yet, which is over 4 GB. With major upgrades like that, I always wait a while to see if people report problems.

 

[davenn]

Now I get about 4 to 6 Mbytes per second.

Which is still dreadfully slow.
Probably a mix of your 5G and the Enet over power. You then discovered part of the lag issue.
But even 10-12Mb/s is slow for internet these days.
I have a 80Mb/s internet at home only occasionally hit that, it averages around 60 to 70 Mb/s. Movies etc from YouTube d/l so fast... 1.5 Gb usually less than 30 odd seconds

Dave

 

[jtbell]

I'm glad now that we went with cellular home internet instead of Spectrum cable internet. When Tropical Storm Helene blew past us two weeks ago, we lost power for four and a half days. After power returned and our cellular gateway booted up, we had our internet back again. Many Spectrum customers in our area still don't have their internet back yet. Some are using their cellphones as mobile hotspots. Local TV news has had reports every night about the continuing Spectrum outages.

(During the power outage, we simply used our phones for basic stuff. We charged them once per day using a charger in our car while driving around.)

Our speeds aren't as fast as they would be with Spectrum, but we're a retired couple, not a family of four all doing Zoom meetings or streaming 4K video simultaneously.