We all know in this forum to regularly have the conversation with our ISP on price increases where they either give or you leave. I had the convo twice this year with my ISP, Ziply (who was bought last year by Bell Canada) and was told to pound sand.
The major phone providers rolled out 5g 5+ years ago and also slowly started offering wireless internet as a home internet service. There was lots of variability in service quality depending on city and wireless provider and overall it has continued to improve. What was (predictably) disappointing was that major providers, including discount wireless and even MNVOs had stubbornly high prices for wireless home internet–until fairly recently. While service speed, quality and price will still vary and depending on your needs it may not suffice but, I wanted to share that it may be worth looking at (or looking at it again if you explored in the past) as both the quality has impressed me so far and the pricing is finally where it should be. With regular/legacy internet providers continuing to jack up prices to pad their margins and consolidation continuing apace in the industry, price increases will continue to eat away at your monthly budget.
I use Mint(T-mob MNVO) as my cell provider and they finally started offering a discount for signing up for wireless home internet; $30/month if you pay a year at a time and are also a wireless phone customer. T-mobile and verizon have 5g wireless service available on their website for $35/mo. AT&T of course lists it for $55 as they’ve always been overpriced, there may be other affordable options worth considering. If you have any good pricing options for your area/region and thoughts on your service experience please feel free to share in the comments.
I got my home gateway this week for Mint and speeds were far in excess of what I was hoping for; 500+mbps down and ~90mbps up with 25-35ms ping. As this was better than the 300/300 fiber I was paying for and not any meaningful experience difference I’m stoked to almost halve my internet bill and wanted to pass this along. Good luck!
Edit: adding cap info as it came up a few times: Mint’s home “internet” is unlimited data but in the fine print it’s a 1TB cap per month after which your data/traffic may be shaped, slowed, deprioritized, etc. Obviously only a marketer would call that “unlimited”, though I doubt most average users would hit 1tb in a month. Other carrier policies may vary.
Congrats on rhe win! Unfortunately, in my rural area, cell signal is non existent. When our WiFi drops I have to drive about a mole to get a bar of service so I can report the outage.
Yeah, sorry you’re in the Internet dead zone, it’s just never going to pencil out to build towers to every corner of large rural areas in any country; hopefully someone launches a non-fascist Starlink equivalent in the future for folks in your predicament. Pretty tough to be without good internet/wireless in 2026. If any of the ISPs would have been held to account to build out rural internet that they took money for the last 30 years you’d probably be in a better spot.
Surely towers are cheaper than a wired connection to every house?
Sure, it’s why most substantive fiber buildouts stopped 10+ years ago. There are still large swaths of land where even the range of a tower it still doesn’t make sense financially as there aren’t enough very rural customers per tower.
It’s nice to get internet that isn’t awful… But other than Fiber, mobile internet always comes with that one elephant in the room… The data cap. “Here is your monthly data, sir” served in a shot glass.
Sucks to be in the sticks. Nobody wants to run internet out to you, and the only good satellite provider is … Yeah.
Thank god the service providers here ditched data caps on their plans like 15 year ago.
I was traveling for a while and did not want to give any money to the Musk for starlink, but I did find calyx.org
cachyoswhich served this exact purpose. Not sure about other countries, but after the initial fee it came out to be about $60 a month for unlimited data. I did have to pay for it up front so a steep entry fee, but I have been very happy with the service over all and would recommend it to anyone who travels a lot. I used it in campgrounds from Florida to Nevada so far and it has been pretty flawless.Edit: I confused the name of the company. It is calyx that offers the 5G internet service through T-Mobile.
Not that kind of Mint, they’re talking about a cell provider. Cachy is a pretty good OS though.
I got my companies mixed up. Thanks for the catch, I updated my post. Everything else was correct though. It is a unlimited mobile 5G hotspot through T-Mobile.
If you qualify (meet one of 3 criteria, and no they don’t check), you can get a $14.89/mo Computers 4 People Shield plan.
UK here, been using this sort of thing for a few years now and still on 4G. 5G routers barely existed when I got it, probably should upgrade sometime now. Not sure which routers are good though.
So much home networking I keep putting off buying and some of it isn’t even that expensive tbh. Better access point and ethernet for a few things. Current set up is good enough I haven’t bothered improving it.
Are there data caps for those affordable plans?
I don’t think Mint does caps, but I think after a certain # of GB of data they throttle you down from “fast data connection” to a “slow data connection”.
As a non-american, that sounds like a (soft) cap. 😅
it’s most definitely a cap… the throttle speeds i’ve seen from all three the main carriers (which provide the towers for everybody else, too) is basically unusable and designed to get you to upgrade your plan or buy more ‘high speed’ gigs.
Nice find. A tip for anyone comparing: look at the total yearly cost, not the monthly promo price. Add equipment fees, taxes, and what the price jumps to after the first 12 months, then divide by 12. Putting a calendar reminder a month before any promo ends is also worth it, since that’s usually when a quick call or a switch saves the most. Even a $20/month drop on a recurring bill adds up to $240 a year without changing anything else in your budget.
