Gaming on 5G Home Internet?

So I'm wondering, a new player to the 5G Home Internet space has come from Mint Mobile(Minternet) and I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with gaming or just outright normal internet use on these wireless 5G Home Internet systems? The Minternet thing is ultra cheap right now($15 per month for Black Friday, $180 in total for 12 months), but I'm not willing to purchase it until I get some feedback from other people who have used it, so I don't waste my time if it's terrible. Anyone use it, how well does it work?

should be fine as long as youre not worried about super low ping times AND have good signal.

Unfortunately location is going to be the #1 variable, and that's not really something anyone here will be able to help you with.

How close are you to the nearest cell tower? Someone who is literally living next to the cell tower will have a very different experience compared to someone that is near the edge of the signal range. You have some control over your signal, depending on where in your home you put your gateway. Something like a basement being a worst-case scenario, and a best-case scenario being having it on an upper-floor, on the side of your house that is closest to the nearest cell tower.

Do you actually have 5G coverage? Many towers in many areas are still 4G LTE. Even if your closest tower is 4G LTE, that wouldn't necessarily give you a bad experience, especially if you have a really good signal, but speeds will be slower.

Congestion. Even if it seems like you have everything dialed-in, there is more potential with a cellular internet connection for congestion during peak hours. This will be hugely dependent on where you live, and is not really about how many people live there as much as it is cell towers per person. A fairly rural area can still suffer congestion issues if the entire area is only served by a single cell tower, etc.

Data limits. *Most* cellular home internet services that I've dealt with offer "Unlimited" service, but include various types of throttling for heavy users. The throttling could potentially reduce your speeds down to the point where gaming latency would be affected. You'll have to examine the terms of your specific service to see exactly what they say about this.

But in a situation where you have a good signal to the cell tower, aren't struggling with frequent congestion issues, and aren't running into any data limits / throttling, the experience can be very good, approaching or even equal to that of other types of home Internet. Unfortunately your best bet is to simply try it out for a month or so. Then you will know.

I can't say for Mint, but T-Mobile works well enough if you live in an area with 5G Midband coverage and can get your router (or external antenna if you buy one) where you get a good signal. We had to use it for a month while Century Link couldn't find their own ass with both hands and our fiber was down (they'd unplugged it from the splitter) and it was ok. Speeds are cable-modemish but not as reliable. Generally it was in the 200-300mbps down, but as high as 500mbps, and like 20-30mbps up. Weather and time of day can affect it though, as can contention on a given tower. Ping times were worse than cable or fiber, but not awful, I think it was like 30-40ms to get to the first hop as opposed to 10ish for cable and 1 or less for fiber.

I didn't game on it a ton, mostly No Mans Sky but that worked fine. Not the most network intensive game to be sure.

However this was only true on the midband, meaning 2500Mhz, signal. That is in our area, but only visible from part of the house. When I first set it up where we normally have our wifi, it was on low band 5G (600mhz) and that was SLOOOOW, mostly on the upstream which made latency and responsiveness pretty bad. Getting it on the midband signal fixed that, but not only does that need to be available in your area, you have to get much better line of sight to it because the higher the frequency the less it penetrates walls and such. If I was going to keep it forever I would have gotten an external antenna but those are quite expensive and not all routers support them (the T-Mobile ones does).

I would be a little concerned with the Mint Mobile deal because I know they don't own their network, they buy time on T-Mobile's network which means their contract may specify they get lower priority. The reason I could see that is T-Mobile's cheapest home internet plan is $35/month right now and that's only if you also have a cellphone with them ($50/month if not). So that Mint is offering it for less than half makes me wonder if the way they can afford it is T-Mobile made them a contract that says something like "You get the excess bandwidth that our customers aren't using," or some such.


Personally, I'd use it only if I didn't have a wired option. It isn't bad, and I've recommended it to people who life out in BFE and can't get cable or fiber, but the wired services I've had have worked better. One thing I will give them though is speed of setup. When our fiber went out we needed something because my GF works from home. Cable would take quite some time to set up and wouldn't want to just be month to month. T-Mobile, I drove to the store, signed the "I agree" thing, left with the router, and set it up at home and had Internet right away.

I did a brief trial of tmo home internet. I see two issues in your future: CGNAT and BufferBloat. Not sure how big a deal CGNAT is with modern gaming, but you're behind a very restrictive NAT for IPv4; IPv6 should be fine though. When I tested, pings would go way high when downloading, like 200ms+ ... on an idle connection, pings were fine (especially since my local DSL starts at 20ms), I also had trouble with their box on my network. Ended up getting fiber which was a huge expense, but is lovely.

5G do wonder all rounded (theory)

5G as noted, works great if you are literally next to a tower, if you even have 1 concrete / brick / metal surface in your way, performance tanks...

MrGuvernment said:

5G as noted, works great if you are literally next to a tower, if you even have 1 concrete / brick / metal surface in your way, performance tanks...

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That's only the high band (mmW 24-71GHz) frequencies. Those are where you get the big gig+ bandwidth, but yes, anything blocking them and they don't work. If you are on Verizon or AT&T though, that's about all you have for ultra fast options. They haven't rolled out much, if any, mid-band yet. T-Mobile is mostly mid-band though and that works much better. T-Mobile has the 2500MHz frequency which, unsurprisingly, works about the same as 2.4GHz WiFi since it is close in frequency, though it goes further because the antennas are high up and stronger signal. It will go through a wall, though it works better through windows, and it gets you pretty good speeds. A couple hundred mbps. AT&T And Verizon would have similar service at some point, though being in the 3600MHz range it'll be slightly worse at penetration.

The slow performance is when you get on to the low bands, 600-700MHz, which are used for wide-area coverage. The lower bandwidth, combined with more people on them, mean they aren't that fast. Also in many cases those bands are shared with 4G, which further slows things down. In theory they can be about twice as fast as 4g, so in the 30-100mbps of real throughput range, though it highly varies.

mamob said:

Hello, wondering if anyone has any advice/tips for improving the service for gaming? The long can be all over the place and wondering if there are any setting I need to adjust for a smoother experience?

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long = lag?
not really. just follow the advice already given.

Biggest advice I'd give is get an external antenna and have it mounted such that it points at the tower. Signal strength and SNR matter a lot to quality.

mamob said:

Hello, wondering if anyone has any advice/tips for improving the service for gaming? The long can be all over the place and wondering if there are any setting I need to adjust for a smoother experience?

Click to expand...

Blatant spam post. This user quoted my previous post, but edited the end of the quoted content to include a spam link.

good eye. reported it?