I'm mainly trying to understand what happens now that many people are switching to T-Mobile and Verizon home Internet (because it's priced at $35 to $50). I've started to see social media reports of outages.
So I'm thinking the hotspot feature on their phones should still work, or maybe not? And maybe then they could roam to a different carrier? Or maybe not? I was speculating that 5G Home Internet is more like conventional FWA in that each customer is qualified based on celltower capacity and distance, so maybe they wouldn't allow it to just switch to a different tower. And adding to the mystery, one of the companies around here that puts in fiber to celltowers has a subsidiary that is doing FTTH. So if VZHI is down because of a fiber cut, will fiber in town also be down? I also wonder what happens to TMHI and VZHI when they upgrade everything on a tower, as happened with the transition from 4G/LTE to 5G. We saw Verizon strip everything off some towers, new RRUs and cables, and then screw around with crews coming out for months because evidently it didn't go smoothly. I'm assuming mobile users would switch to another tower, perhaps at lower speeds, but what about home Internet? From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Trey Scarborough Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2025 10:10 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] mobile and 5G Home Internet when a celltower is offline As Adam stated if the site gets disconnected it it will drop all the connections. Home internet is less likely to connect to another tower. Most will prefer the higher frequency bands and in many cases are depending on small cells to provide coverage. With that being the case it is often that it will not fail over to the lower frequency. If your looking for phone service that will fail over to multiple carriers US Mobile is probably the best solution. You can get service that will run on multiple carriers for a nominal monthly charge. On 8/12/25 1:36 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote: Who here knows more than I do about how cellular networks work during a celltower outage? Would I be correct to assume that if, for example, a Verizon tower is offline, your mobile phone would connect to another nearby Verizon tower? And that you could not only make voice calls and send text messages, but also use your phone as a hotspot for Internet? And that if there was no other Verizon tower in range, your phone would roam to a T-Mobile or AT&T tower? And in that case, could you still use the hotspot feature? Now, what about Home Internet service? Would I be correct to assume no roaming and probably not even another Verizon tower? If your designated tower is down, no home Internet? One last question, if the tower has power and all the electronics is running but the backhaul to the tower is down (like a fiber cut), do phones still connect to the tower but have no service? Or will they move to another tower?
-- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
