AT&T is expanding the availability of its $55 per month Internet Air plan (or $60 per month without autopay), which uses 5G to beam Wi-Fi into your home. The plan comes with no overage fees, equipment costs, or annual contracts, but AT&T will charge up to $10 per month extra for up to five Wi-Fi extenders.
The plan offers download speeds of 40 to 140Mbps, but AT&T may “temporarily slow data speeds” if the network is busy. Once you sign up for the service, AT&T will send you its All-Fi Hub, a 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) receiver that you’ll wirelessly connect your devices to.
While AT&T started testing its Internet Air plan in Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, it’s now coming to more cities, including Detroit, Cincinnati, Hartford, Salt Lake City, Tampa, Seattle, and others. You can view the full list of locations here. If you have an eligible wireless service with AT&T, the Internet Air plan will cost $35 per month.
Other rival carriers already offer 5G home internet plans. While Verizon’s most basic plan costs $50 with autopay (or $60 without), T-Mobile’s plan similarly costs $50 with automatic payments. Still, using mobile data to power the internet throughout your house may not be all that efficient.
My former colleague Mitchell Clark tried out T-Mobile’s 5G Home Internet service in 2021 and found that it couldn’t reliably handle video, streams, multiplayer games, and cloud backups on a daily basis, stating that the “router almost always had a ‘weak’ cellular signal.” Of course, your experience with 5G home internet largely depends on whether where you live has good cell service, which means getting the service can be a bit of a gamble.
