I hope everyone is healthy and hanging in there. Before I get started. I wanted to say thanks for listening and supporting Alpine's non-profit community radio station.

Things have been crazy with the pending relocation of our broadcast antenna. We are waiting for approval from both the Federal Communications Comission and the Government of Mexico. You can follow that saga here. We thank all of you that have downloaded the iHeart Radio app and listened online. More details on that are here.

Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, lets get in to our experience with the new internet service provider available in Alpine.

A couple of months ago my teenage daughter had an accident with her cell phone. It happens. We made an early Saturday morning run to our cell provider to get it replaced.

Like many of you we are trying to get more done with less and I'm always open to kick the tires on something new if I can save my family a few bucks. I had been following the growth of T-Mobile's Home internet service and every once in a while I would check only to find the service wasn't available at my home.

Well, surprise surprise!

The team at the store said my home was now in the coverage area. I added the gateway to my shopping list and a few hours later I was home setting it up. I had 30 days of free service and if the service wasn't satisfactory, I could return the modem for a refund.

The setup was super easy. They suggest the gateway be close to a window in your home for the best signal and if you have a 2nd floor it's best to have it upstairs.

Over the next few days I started to slowly migrate devices to the T-Mobile service from the existing provider. The whole time I have my internal fingers crossed. After surving the pandemic with kids homeschooling and getting the annoying text messages from my broadband provider about being close to my data cap and that additional fees would be charged, this is one relationship I was ready to be done with.

At the two week marker all devices were connected and working well. 3 smart TV's, 4 laptops, a desktop, a few smartspeakers, a Nintendo switch, and my Grace Digital internet radio (based out of Poway!!) all working well and no hiccups. I will note that I had the family switch all smartphones and tablets that had data service to use data and not connect to the gateway.

I would consider my family moderate to heavy users when it comes to broadband and didn't have any complaints. 

When the last day of service came up with the existing provider, I called to say goodbye. The rep was kind of snarky. "Well, when you come back you can call us here and we can get you restarted pretty quickly. They always come back when someone switches to T-Mobile".

60 days in we are 100% satisfied with the service and won't be back. For my family, this is a huge savings. The previous provider was up to $135 a month plus those occasional pesky overages. We are now paying $50 a month and we were out $99 for the gateway purchase. 

One last thing I will say is that at last check, my home is showing a 5g extended range and not 5g ultra. I'm sure this has an effect on the download/upload speed. This tells me that the service has some growing to do and will only get better as more areas switch to 5g ultra.

I know all situations are different. This may not be what works for your family, but it has worked well for mine and with a one time equipment charge of $99 we dropped our yearly spending for broadband from $1620 a year to $600 a year.

That's over $1000 of savings over the year. 

As a final note, I didn't get any promotional consideration for this post. I paid out of my pocket for the gateway and pay the monthly service charge like any other customer. No referral links. If this ends up working for you and our non-profit community radio station saves you a little money, please consider donating :)

Thanks for reading and listening!

Chris