this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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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.

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[–] HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] schwim@piefed.zip 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Surely towers are cheaper than a wired connection to every house?

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Fallibilist@feddit.uk 3 points 2 days ago

Thank god the service providers here ditched data caps on their plans like 15 year ago.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The type of plans OP is talking about are for home internet, and typically do not have caps.

[–] HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

My provider doesn't need to know what I use the SIM for, it just so happens that my router can also make unlimited texts along with having unlimited data.

Now I kinda wonder which of those "unlimited" claims is easiest to push over.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

towers have finite capacity in terms of devices connected and of bandwidth each can handle. cellular literally cannot provide a truly unlimited service without caps or throttles or some other service degradation to manage the network, and will have something (usually baked-into their terms somewhere) that allows them to slow you down or cut you off if you 'use too much' by whatever metrics they utilize.

[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

This. Yes, it's Unlimited* on 5G, but often you have to be on UWB 5G, which you aren't getting unless you're in the city or in a dense urban area that has a UWB tower close by... If you're in the sticks, you're getting the 700mhz band 5G, which is only double the speed of 4G on the same fre, and has different bandwidth rules because it has much less bandwidth available, which is shared by everybody on that tower, and when it gets busy, there is network contention.

[–] HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

Still using 4G, at times I could appreciate faster downloads on steam but other than that its fine.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You and Op are both right; for my example 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 unless hosting, massively to renting, etc. which is not the mandatory use case for most on Frugal.

Also, the cell towers have fiber run to them so wouldn't they have the same theoretical bandwidth to the tower as a fiber line? Obviously from the tower to your wireless 5g gateway you've got signal strength and normal degradation, but I'd guess the actual "limit" to a 5g tower and the number of simultaneous connections it can handle is probably not an issue for the majority of sites not in a densely urban area.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

yes. tower capacity also includes how many devices can connect.

a couple of tv watchers and a gamer in your house can easily hit 1tb in a month.

i'm far removed from urban areas. for most of the county and neighboring ones, it's either cellular or satellite. in town has choices--shitty ones, and even many of those users are opting for cellular at present. cellular coverage sucks ass, but towers here are packed anyway from those who can get a signal. everybody gets throttled soon as their 'gigs' are up.

[–] HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

What kind of games are you playing to use that much data? Games don't really use much normally. Or are you downloading massive new games every few days?

[–] dracc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Quick maths gives that 1 TB equals to just over 3 Mbps if spread over every second of a month. Just a speed test (5 seconds at full speed) at 500 Mbps eats about 15 minutes of that. A game download (60 GB) would eat almost 2 full days worth of data.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Or, as I saw this morning IOTs, apparently having a thirrrsty Keurig: https://i.ibb.co/wZwpMs57/2107284088247689290.jpg

[–] Whiskey_iicarus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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 ~~cachyos~~ which 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.

[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] dracc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Are there data caps for those affordable plans?

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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".

[–] dracc@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As a non-american, that sounds like a (soft) cap. 😅

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.