Easiest Internet Switch: T-Mobile 5G Home Internet

Your most powerful tool as an internet customer is your ability to switch providers. That’s why we compare internet service providers (ISPs) using the best data and customer feedback. We know that many households could be paying less for better internet service.

But there’s always one major obstacle to lowering your bill and improving your service: the dreaded provider switch. The combined hassle of finding the right plan, paying fees, waiting for an installation, rewiring your home, and switching your equipment prevent unhappy customers from escaping their current providers. T-Mobile does away with all that, for a fast and painless internet switch.

T-Mobile 5G Home Internet has turned the internet onboarding process on its head and proved an ISP switch doesn’t have to be a slog. According to thousands of internet customers and our own testing, switching to T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is cheap and easy, delivering the service you need more conveniently than any other provider, hands down.

But exactly how fast and how easy is it to switch to T-Mobile 5G Home Internet?

Simply put, T-Mobile can get you a new internet service within one to two hours of deciding to make the switch; we tested the process ourselves. This is a customer experience that is uniquely efficient, straightforward, and free of hidden details, which means you can move quickly.

When T-Mobile launched its 5G home internet in 2021, it was a seasoned telecommunications company, but a newborn ISP, and one with some attractive new tech: completely wireless 5G for homes. Before 5G, any internet service worth its salt required physical networking cables in your home, which meant an expensive installation, a long appointment window, in addition to a dozen other pain points that customers have become accustomed to over the past two decades—all of which T-Mobile avoids.

T-Mobile 5G Home Internet uses the same wireless signal that cell phones use to bring internet service into your home. So, just like your cell phone, no cables are required, and it’s extremely easy to set up and manage. It’s a flawless customer experience you could only get from wireless technology.

But it’s not just the tech that makes T-Mobile different and the easiest internet switch—it’s also got a competitive edge on other 5G providers. When T-Mobile launched its home internet, it leveraged its already massive capabilities as a telco giant to change the frustrating norms of internet service, using budget-friendly, low-stress and plainly-stated policies. We’ll dig into the details, but here are the main keys to T-Mobile’s smooth customer experience.

Sign up and set up

• Straightforward plans and cheap pricing
• Pick up your new equipment right away (or choose to ship)
• 15-minute installation with no cables, no appointments
• Widest coverage area in the U.S.—a great ISP you can actually get! (Looking at you Google.)

Policy

• No price hikes (five-year price guarantee)
• Unlimited data
• No contracts; cancel anytime
• Plainly advertised pricing; no hidden fees, no tricks
• All plans are fast enough for the average household
• Plans start at just $50
• 15-day money-back guarantee, confirmed by many customers online

Just about anyone that lives in a U.S. city or suburb (and many rural areas) can get T-Mobile 5G Home Internet; it’s easily the ISP with the biggest coverage area in the country, with an internet footprint that covers more homes than the nation’s two largest ISPs (Xfinity and Spectrum) combined. Although T-Mobile is a young ISP, it’s been expanding and upgrading its network for decades. That’s how it already has more coverage than any other ISP.

Budget pricing and low-stress plans

Our favorite thing about T-Mobile is the price, just $50 a month, and that includes the router, unlimited data, and taxes, and fees. And that base price has a five-year price guarantee. You really will pay just $50 per month for high-speed home internet. We can confirm our price hasn’t increased a single cent since we began testing T-Mobile’s 5G internet in 2022.

Most ISPs operate very differently, using each of the perks above to justify a real rate that looks nothing like what you saw advertised. With your average ISP, you might get a low advertised rate for the first year, but it won’t match your bill. Expect a hefty installation charge plus recurring router rental fees, data fees, maybe even get a “network access” or “maintenance” fee, which all serve as disguised immediate price hikes.

Detecting these fine-print pitfalls is one of the most stressful parts of switching to a new provider, but T-Mobile does away with all of them, making the switch easy. The fact that T-Mobile managed to resolve so many decades-old customer gripes in one fell swoop deserves applause.

Choosing a plan is straightforward

Choosing a T-Mobile internet plan is simple, and you don’t have to go through the contract with a fine-toothed comb to find hidden fees or weird terms.

The speeds are similar for all three plans, and the base plan, Rely Internet, is fast enough for most customers. The Amplified and All-in come with an enhanced gateway that gets your connection a little more speed out of the 5G signal. The All-In plan has additional perks, like a Wi-Fi mesh satellite (good for big homes) and free subscriptions to two top streaming services. Aside from those few details, there’s not much to think about. Once you pick a plan, you can have your 5G router shipped to you or pick it up at a T-Mobile retail location the same day.

15-minute self-installation

T-Mobile’s 15-minute internet install is the fastest and easiest there is; we tested it ourselves. There’s no networking cables, technician, or long appointment windows. The mobile app does everything for you, including finding the best spot for your router using a neat camera feature.

After that, you just connect the gateway to power, and the app walks you through the quick setup of your new home network.

And that’s it! You’ve officially switched internet providers in record time.

We doubt you’ll need it, but if you do need help with the install, T-Mobile has live agents at the ready.

Better performance than fiber and cable

It’s understandable that some were skeptical of 5G’s capabilities as a primary home internet service in the beginning, but by now, the results are in. 5G does not disappoint, especially when it comes to speed and reliability, as T-Mobile surpasses many cable and fiber internet providers.

T-Mobile’s home internet excelled in our reliability scoring system, built from outage ratio research for every ISP, reliability reporting from thousands of internet customers, and network outage data. And it’s the same story with the speeds, according to the 10,000 internet customers we surveyed in 2025.

Technologically, it makes sense that T-Mobile would be more reliable than hardwired cable and fiber ISPs. Cable and fiber internet rely on enormous wired networks that use miles of cabling to carry internet signals, which equates to more potential points of failure. If essential lines are damaged at any point between you and the world-wide-web, you lose internet service completely until the lines are repaired.

T-Mobile uses cell towers instead of cables, and cell towers don’t go down nearly as often as ISP wired networks due to robust backup power and overlapping coverage areas: if a tower does go down, there’s often another within range. Of course, network hiccups can still happen, which are a guaranteed experience with any ISP, unfortunately. But T-Mobile is unlikely to ever go down completely, granted you’re firmly within its 5G coverage area.

During our home test of T-Mobile 5G, which has been running for two years now, the connection has never completely failed long enough for us to notice. And most of the time, it’s lightning quick, just like any cable or fiber connection.

Customers says speeds are just as fast as fiber and cable

We asked 10,000 internet customers to rate their provider’s speeds. T-Mobile customers gave high ratings, well above many fiber and cable ISP giants, like Cox and Spectrum. This suggests that T-Mobile’s speeds are right in the goldilocks zone of what’s best for a home internet service.

Our two-year T-Mobile experience

For the past two years, we’ve been conducting a T-Mobile 5G Home Internet test by using the service as the primary internet connection in an internet-heavy, remote-working environment with an average of two to four users at any given time. The connection performed so reliably that it has been used over a cable internet connection at the same location for all internet tasks.

Our results

Internet plan: T-Mobile Rely Home Internet

Price: $50/mo.

Price guarantee: Confirmed. No bill has been a single cent over $50 (including tax and fees).

Installation time: Just under 15 minutes

Average real-world speed: 318Mbps (average of speed tests run at regular and consistent intervals)

Complete outages: Zero in over two years

Network slowdowns: Happens 1–2 times monthly; resolves in minutes

Our notes

Latency is excellent for gaming and video calls

• No observed or measured decreased performance compared to a cable internet connection at the same address

More reliable than a cable internet service at the same address

• No complete outages

No management required

• Never had to call in for help.