T-Mobile has had its Home Internet service for a couple years now, giving homes and small businesses relatively affordable and fast internet connections. At $50/mo (if you’re grandfathered in or have an active voice line), T-Mobile Home Internet is a pretty good deal for a lot of people. That pricing reflects its use as a primary internet connection, though. What if you just need a backup?
If you live in a rural area with frequent power outages, or you’re a small business that needs to always be online, $50/mo might be a bit too much to pay for a secondary internet connection. Unfortunately, the other backup internet options generally aren’t much better. You could spend $15/mo for 1GB of data through a few carriers, but 1GB is not a lot, and the cost per gigabyte can leave you with a really high bill at the end of the month.
Then there’s the popular hotspot plan from T-Mobile, where $10/mo will get you 30GB of hotspot data. Not bad, but also requires separate hotspot hardware.
Of course, there are also more generous satellite internet plans, but those are usually at least $75/mo and require expensive equipment. Needless to say, there’s a bit of a gap in the market for affordable backup internet.
T-Mobile is hoping to fill that gap with its recently-introduced Business Internet Backup plan. For $30/mo, T-Mobile will send you a Home Internet gateway that you can use for “up to 7 days” per billing cycle. And if you sign up during the introductory period, you’ll only be paying $15/mo. Even $30/mo is pretty cheap for a backup internet connection, and $15/mo is even better.
There aren’t too many details on what exactly the terms of this plan are, unfortunately. It seems like the data you get is unlimited in terms of how much of it you use, with the limitation coming into play with how long you can use it for. But “up to 7 days” is a very vague statement and doesn’t really mean much on its own. If you have a dual-WAN router and it periodically sends a ping over the Backup internet to check for connectivity, does that mark that day as one of the seven you have that month? Or is it like old dial-up plans, where you get 168 hours of connectivity before you’re cut off?
It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t following T-Mobile’s usual pattern of including taxes and fees in the plan price for most customers. Anyone who signs up for this plan will owe additional money on top of the base $15 or $30 every month. Those extra costs usually aren’t very high, but it does add even more uncertainty.
Hopefully T-Mobile will release more details about the Business Internet Backup plan soon, so people aren’t tying up customer service representatives asking for the same information over and over. If you want to check the plan out for yourself, you’ll have to call T-Mobile to get it. The plan details, such as they are, and the number to call are available here on T-Mobile’s website. Do note that this is a “Business” plan, so existing customers with a consumer plan aren’t likely able to add it to their existing account.
