Question

T-Mobile Gateway and Orbi AC2200 Tri-band WiFi Router w 5 satellites

  • 21 June 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 155 views

Badge

I live in a 100 year old brick building.  I have one of the 2,500 sq ft condos.  The walls consist of brick, wire lathing, and plaster. (This is a serious Faraday cage)  I currently have comcast as my ISP but want to change.  To get a Wi-Fi signal through the condo I currently have an Orbi router and 5 satellites.  Would the T-Mobile gateway connect to my Orbi router and have enough bandwidth to service my home?


2 replies

The main issue is if you’ll get a decent signal to the router. If you do, then you can use the existing Orbi router and plug it into the Tmo one, and it’ll work the same as your current setup.

 

Whether there is enough bandwidth is wholly dependent on the signal you’ll get on LTE/5G.

Userlevel 7
Badge +8

So, if you have a 5G Android cell phone download one of the cellular network scanner apps and look for signal strength and tower locations in the area. If you use cell mapper.net to look for the PCI information you can locate the T-Mobile 4G LTE and 5G NR towers in the area and see what cell signals are present and now far away they are. With just a little homework you can have a better idea if you can get a good shot at a cellular signal there. If you are in a larger city you may actually get an n41 5G signal and get some great speeds. If T-Mobile has the coverage in the area worked out and stable it could be a nice solution for the price. Sure you might have to put the gateway really close to a window to get the signal but that is not too uncommon. 

Reply