It was never really ready—that 5G Home Internet service that T-Mobile widely promoted.
T-Mobile’s website had one of those check your location maps. Just give us your information and we’ll tell you what’s available in your area. According to the map, my wife and I were prime candidates for T-Mobile’s 5G Ultra Capacity service. Little did we know, in reality, the service didn’t exist.
It’s not that we didn’t get any service. For a week, we received acceptable Internet service,
it just wasn’t 5G.
On Sunday, September 18, 2022 when our T-Mobile 5G Home Internet became almost totally unusable
we were quite worried. We do everything online. We work, study, meet with our doctors, share face time with faraway family, we shop and have family movie nights. I guess we’re like most modern families.
When we were told by T-Mobile that they had taken our community of T-Mobile 5G Home Internet users offline for one to two weeks for “modernization” maintenance, my anxiety went through the roof. I mean, what kind of company would schedule this degree of customer facing maintenance with such a tremendous degree of negative customer impact without first informing their customers?
I had a colleague who used to say, “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission” I am beginning to think that T-Mobile has embraced this idea wholeheartedly. In this day and age it is an insanely simple process to integrate customer notifications into any workflow. There is simply no excuse for T-Mobile not notifying its customers about the maintenance that it claimed to be absolutely necessary.
Tomorrow, when I publish this blog entry, our T-Mobile 5G Home Internet will have been almost completely unusable for 5 days. Since I began writing about our experience I have received many messages, and participated in a number of calls with other affected users, and we’ve come to a rather unbelievable conclusion as to the nature of T-Mobile’s “maintenance”, and why T-Mobile couldn’t notify its customers. This is going to sound ridiculous, but just hear me out.
What if T-Mobile’s 5G Home Internet, which was widely advertised as being available in our area of Thorndale, PA – was never really, completely here?
It wouldn’t be the first time sales and promotional hype outpaced delivery and availability. A matter of fact, if T-Mobile hadn’t severely crippled the service with their recent “maintenance”, most of us wouldn’t have known that there was anything wrong with the service. This is because the T-Mobile router that we installed in your homes would have connected to a nearby tower in 5G, if it was available, but it was also capable of “falling back” to the older LTE mode. The speed would have been acceptable for most of us, and we might not have known what we were missing in 5G. At least not immediately.
This had us wondering, why was T-Mobile in such a rush to get this “modernization maintenance” completed, and why do it in such a way as to inflict the highest degree of displeasure and pain upon its customers. I mean, what responsible company does that.
How about the kind of company that would over promote the availability of a service, and then in a panic, rush from community to community to install it!
I propose that on Saturday, September 10, 2022 when I purchased our T-Mobile 5G Home Internet service after confirming the availability for our address, the 5G Internet service was, in fact, not available as T-Mobile claimed, and that the work that T-Mobile began on September 18, 2022, was T-Mobile’s frantic effort to get the promised 5G service installed on the tower at the corner of E. Kings Hwy and N. Bailey Road in Thorndale, PA., a little over a mile from my home.
Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I am certain that when the work orders for that day and that tower are examined, most of the activity will be found to have been 5G related.
What actually took place will be known in time. The question is; What do we do once we know?