5G Home Internet from T-Mobile has been wildly successful for the company. Not only is it a huge asset for rural areas with no other options, it’s popular with people that have traditional ISP options but are sick of dealing with the cable monopolies.
The service includes the use of a 5G gateway from the company, and the latest model has been the G4AR, made by Arcadyan. It made waves and fast became the popular gateway due to it’s inclusion of external antenna ports.
Now, according to the FCC, as well as an internal source providing more information, we now know what T-Mobile’s next 5G Home Internet gateway will be. There are a few improvements, but a major downside.
Introducing the TMOG5AR!
The Good
First up, here’s the good news.
An internal image, shown below, suggests that this new gateway can reach “up to” 2x the speed of, presumably, the Gen 4 gateway. Plus there’s claims of improvements to latency (ping) and reliability.
Based on our research on the chips used in the gateway, it will support Release 16 of the 3GPP standard. This is an improvement over the G4AR, which used Release 15. So what does this mean? A few things.
Faster speeds, lower pings
First of all, these are all improvements that come with Release 16, and not necessarily improvements that will be in the new gateway. That being said, there’s not much reason to design a new gateway without improvements, so many of these are expected to be implemented. With that said, on to the improvements.
The first one up that’s worth mentioning is improved low-latency. This means that the connection between the gateway and the tower takes less time to make the trip, thus lowering your ping. It probably won’t reach fiber-levels of low-latency, but it’ll be an improvement.
Then there are improvements to “Massive MIMO”. This utilizes similar features to modern WiFi, like beamforming, to improve the connection between the device and the cell towers.
Finally, and potentially most importantly, is something called “UL Tx Switching”. It’s a bit complicated, but essentially it allows for faster upload using the same bands already deployed, and is part of “5G Advanced”.
T-Mobile themselves bragged early last year about how record upload speeds were set using this exact technology, so it’s possible the new gateway can drastically improve upload speeds (if it’s been implemented).
In addition, there are likely improvements to the Carrier Aggregation abilities of this new gateway, enabling more simultaneous tower connections.
The rest of the improvements that come with Release 16 likely won’t mean much for a T-Mobile Home Internet gateway, but you can read more about Release 16 here.
WiFi 7
The new G5AR supports the latest in WiFi technology, WiFi 7. This enables faster-than-gigabit over WiFi for supported devices, and ensures that no matter how fast the cellular connection is, the WiFi will be able to keep up.
Interestingly, there are no indications of a WiFi mesh device like what is provided with the G4AR on the All-In plan, but we can guess that T-Mobile may eventually release a mesh to go alongside this new gateway.
The bad
Now for the downsides to the new gateway.
The biggest issue many will have with the new gateway is that it gets rid of the external antenna ports that everyone loved on the G4AR. That means customers wanting to use external antennas, like the ones from our friends over at Waveform, are going to have to disassemble the gateway quite a bit to get at those internal antenna connectors.
The connectors appear to be on the very back of the circuit board, meaning quite a lot of disassembly would be required to reach them, even more so than past gateways.
We’ve included a highlighted internal image of the connectors below, using an image found at the FCC.
Then, there’s also the fact that these gateways appear to still only have gigabit ethernet ports (based on looking up the ethernet controller chip model). That means that if you’re in an area that can hit over a gigabit in 5G speeds, you’ll still be capped at around 940mbps via ethernet. At least this time around there’s the WiFi 7 to bridge that gap, but still, why not add a 2.5g port T-Mobile?
Finally, according to internal sources, the new gateway will begin being offered exclusively on the “Amplified” plan. That’s T-Mobile’s mid-tier 5G Home Internet plan. Why is T-Mobile not expanding the G5AR to the “All-In” plan? Our only guess is that the All-In plan includes a mesh extender, and the G5AR doesn’t currently have one.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve already got 5G Home Internet from T-Mobile, you probably don’t need the new gateway. Especially if you use an external antenna. The benefits exist, but likely aren’t good enough to make you go through the hassle of swapping out your old G4AR. In fact, we expect T-Mobile to forbid customers from swapping initially anyway.
Overall, essentially, the new G5AR is almost like a mid-cycle upgrade for the G4AR. Think of it as the “Playstation 5 Pro” of gateways, improving on what the G4AR already does. That is, except for losing the external antenna jacks.
The new G5AR Home Internet Gateway is scheduled to drop on July 21st, and will be available only to new Amplified plan customers that sign up online (aka “Digital” sales). We’ll be sure to keep you updated as we learn more.
