TL;DR: You can get a fairly cheap backup internet plan from TMobile for $20 a month. It gives you 130 GB of data which is about enough for 4-7 days depending on usage which should be more than enough if you are relying on Xfinity/ATT/etc. If you care only about cost, the setup I have now is $35 a month from Xfinity for unlimited internet at 300 Mbps and backup internet from TMobile at $20 a month. That is $55 a month all in. Combined with something like a battery backup, or my persona preference EcoFlow, and you can effectively run internet for a substantial amount of time which in emergency or crisis situation is crucial.
Why two internet connections?
You know that frustration when the internet goes out? Whether it is kiddos, gaming nights, online work meetings, or any number of reasons, it is super frustrating. It could be worse though. What about times of climate crisis or infrastructure outages? If you have only one working internet connection, how do you get information on when things will get better? How do you get help if you need it?
Many of us will answer to use our phones, but what if your phone plan is bundled with your ISP and that network is out? XFinity, ATT, and TMobile all have mobile phone service and high speed internet options now and even incentivize users to bundle plans together to reduce the cost. However, if you and your family have the same phone plan and the network is down, what do you do? To safeguard against that, I make sure that my family all has a different phone provider so that we can always have someone that can get a signal out and get help or find out what is going on.
Still, with numerous infrastructure outages, I hit my limit and decided to look for a solution.
Firstly, I believe in fiber optics and was a CFOI back in the early 2000s. However, with my Xfinity home internet being unstable lately I wanted to see what other options were out there for a relatively modest cost. It turns out, finding another solution that was inexpensive was pretty hard, mainly because the price plans are designed for using a month’s worth of data. For my backup internet needs, I needed something that had enough data for a few days to accommodate for Xfinity outages, but at a fraction of a full month’s plan cost.
For my mission, I planned three different target objectives:
- Objective 1 was a cheap plan.
- Objective 2 was a reliable plan.
- Objective 3 was a large data cap plan.
Time to start pricing out the plans
As a side note, many already do this, but for those that don’t, please don’t lease a modem, ever. If the ISP doesn’t give it to you for free, then go buy one. Renting a modem makes the plans costs a lot more. For example, take the XFinity plans. With each of their plans, that is $15 a month added on, but a DOCSIS 3 modem can be purchased for $79 which is under 6 months of lease payments.
If you are unfamiliar with what DOCSIS is, the main thing to understand is that if you want to have 1Gbps downloads you need a DOCSIS 3 modem and if you want faster than that, you need a DOCSIS 3.1 modem.
Spreadsheet of prices
Here is my analysis as of August 2024 comparing the big three that are the widely available. Note, I did not include some ISPs since they are expensive, such as Starlink, or are not available in many parts of the US, such as Verizon, GoogleFi, or other fiber providers. That said, here is what is easily available to most.
Here is the breakdown after looking at each vendor’s website. Below are the more detailed references and data points.
XFinity – Cheapest of them all
Looking at XFinity and they are pretty good if you want a cheap plan that has unlimited internet. Even though the first two plans don’t mention unlimited data, they can be purchased as addons for $15 a month. For comparison, the next closest unlimited internet option is TMobile’s Home Internet plan for $50 a month which is $15 more than XFinity’s 300 Mbps plan. One caveat, XFinity limits their upload speeds. In the case of the 300 Mbps plan, it gets around 20 Mbps of upload. If you share large files, just be patient or plan accordingly.
However, if you want the fastest upload speed or download speed, then ATT has them beat.
ATT – Fastest of them all
Here are the five current plans available. They are not sorted based on price or speed. All have unlimited data. All have an upload speed nearly equivalent to the download speed.
If the fastest download speed or the fastest upload speed is your goal, then ATT is your jam.
TMobile – Most flexible of them all
Here are the three plans being offered by TMobile.
Expanding the Broadband Facts shows the following:
Pretty fair. They have unlimited data for their main plans and the backup plan is basically a fraction of the data and cost. Theoretically, if you were to compare XFinity which gives you 1200 GB per month of data and you were to use the TMobile data cap of 130 GB that would be about 11% of the cost. Comparing the download speeds for TMobile’s plan to XFinity and the most equivalent is the 300 Mbps plan which is normally $79 a month.
That means that at 11% of the $79 a month plan that should cost about $9 a month. Nothing is that cheap, but all things being as equal as possible and TMobile has the fairest or at least closest price to what we would expect for a contract less deal.
One other note this brings up. Remember when your contract is going to end so that you can renegotiate or move to someone else. My recommendation is to setup a calendar reminder ahead of time.
What happens when you get two internet connections?
That depends on your setup. If you have a router that does not handle multiple WAN connections, then when one ISP goes out, you can simply plug the other one in. It is manual, but easy and fast. Alternatively, there are some routers that can do this for you, such as Ubiquiti. Here is what my configuration looks like.
But what if you already have TMobile or if it is not available? Is there another way to have a backup internet plan for $20? Actually there is. Based on the spreadsheet of info we can reverse the logic such that if we had TMobile or ATT already and wanted a backup plan, we could get the cheapest tier of XFinity for $20 a month using the $30 plan with a $10 AutoPay credit. Keep in mind this is excluding a model lease and also has a data cap of 1200 GB per month.
Summary and Closing Thoughts:
In an age where the internet has moved from a luxury to a necessity and it makes sense to spend a little extra on essential items. In this case, spending $20 a month can increase peace of mind by helping to increase utility reliability and improve changes of having another means of communication when it might be most critical.