My T-Mobile Home Internet device arrived today. Comcrap gets the boot. (It’s Comcrapstic!)

Well, it’s been a week since my landlord weed whacked my Comcast line.

He said I could have them fix it but he’d remove it again if he didn’t like how they put it back in, so instead of escalating the argument, I decided to let it go and get T-Mobile’s home internet plan.

Even in my basement apartment, I’m able to get a 3/5 bar signal strength and RSRP of 100-102 at what appears to be the ideal part of my basement apartment, which is in the middle of the picture window. I checked with both the device and my cell phone, which is also using T-Mobile, to scout out various areas of my home, to see if there were any surprises. Hell, if I could make it go a little faster by planting it on the refrigerator, I would… Alas, T-Mobile was correct that the optimal spot is somewhere in or near a window.

On promo, they offered home internet for $50 a month, equipment included, with a promise that the cost would never go up for the life of the account. They said it was for the “inconvenience” of having to wait a while for my modem to ship, but in the end it only took 6 days from placing the order to getting their “trash can” modem, made by Nokia apparently. (Trash can is what people on Reddit call it, because it looks a lot like those trash can Mac Pros.)

The quick setup instructions ask you to install a T-Mobile Internet app on your Android or iPhone, but you can do it over 192.168.12.1, and using the credentials on the bottom of the device. (Why does everything need an app?)

So far, it seems to work at least as well as my Comcast plan did, with the exception that the ping times to all of the Private Internet Access servers are pretty bad and Wireguard doesn’t seem to work at all on T-Mobile unless the “Use Small Packets” setting is on.

Off the VPN, I seem to be able to download files at around 5 Megabytes per second, which is about as well as I could hope for, given the unfortunate placement options for the modem. On the VPN, it’s considerably slower, although my subscription to PIA runs out in 71 days and I may just let it lapse and try out Mullvad or something.

PIA has been getting weird lately, and the stated location of their servers have nothing to do with where they actually are, so there’s no telling which one to connect to for optimal throughput.

Also, a lot of them are now hosted by some lulzy sounding company called “FreedomTech Solutions”. Roy Schestowitz in Techrights IRC asked me to look into them, but other than some Buzzword Bullshit Bingo-sounding websites and a few LinkedIns, I can’t really figure out what it is they do. PIA was quietly taken over by a company that made browser toolbars that were surreptitiously installed by Potentially Unwanted Applications, and all of their original support people disappeared and the website was completely revamped.

I’m not liking this. I’m not liking this at all.

Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad servers, but there’s not much financial advantage to using Mozilla’s client to access them, especially if you pay by the month. Mozilla wants $9.99 by the month or $4.95 a month if you pay by the year, and with Mullvad directly it’s $5.50 a month no matter how long you pay for.

Both have a 30 day money back guarantee, so you’re not risking your money to find out you have something that doesn’t work, but Mozilla probably wins by encouraging people to pay for a year up front for a 55 cent per month discount and then takes advantage of the time value of money to park it in inflation-backed T-Notes or something, where they can just sit on them and earn a lot of interest.

Anyway, the Comcast lines can just sit out there mangled for all I care. That shit is whack, yo. It’s nice knowing that T-Mobile makes it a feature to point out no data caps or over the limit fees or throttling. I checked out how well streaming works on it and I can run 4K Netflix on my Fire TV just fine. Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video both work fine too. I’m not really a streaming person, but my spouse is and I get them all “gratis” with something else, so there’s no reason not to log into them.

Comcast has never “needed” to impose data caps. It does it to prop up their failing cable TV bundles and exempt their own TV services which they can host themselves. While there definitely are scandals at T-Mobile, this isn’t one of them for the time being.

Comcast also owns NBC and has a long and sordid history with copyright maximalists. Years ago, they used a blunt instrument called Sandvine to cripple bittorrent, even if what you were downloading was totally legal, like Free and Open Source office suites, operating systems, and public domain stuff from Project Gutenberg, and now they extend enforcement well past what American laws require with a six strikes program that can disconnect you from the internet.

Meanwhile, Google uses a DRM called Widevine. You notice a pattern with the Sandvines and the Widevines. They’re like kudzu vines for the internet. A noxious, pestilent weed that insists on killing the entire forest until nothing good can ever grow there again. Such is the modern web. What was a stomping ground for creators and innovators is now stomped in favor of corporate content mills, which wrap their wares in DRM so it can’t be viewed in the free world.

I went and stood in line to return Comcast’s “free” Flex streaming box to avoid a “$500 fee” on my last bill (when everyone has a streaming box for $30-50.). It wasn’t even good and the power management on it sucked. It never even turned itself off, so it would just keep playing even if the TV went off, and it would sit there using at least enough juice to stay warm all the time. Bet that’s great for their carbon footprint.

If you must use Comcrap, I’d advise you to say no to the Flex Box. Chances are it’s redundant, it uses a ton of power, and if you forget to return it, they’ll turn it over to collections as a $500 loss (LOL) and ruin your credit score.