Not sure if this topic has been discussed too much but didn't see any topics on the first 4 pages.

Live in rural North Central Texas. Looking to cord cut and go to a streaming option. Currently (and recently) went to TMobile home Internet. It's not bad and much cheaper than what we had been running previously. Still has moments where speeds are low. Just noticed Starlink is available in our area. Is it worth the price to upgrade? Would be running 3-4 tvs in the house and a laptop, desktop (for Plex) and several phones.

I have done hacked hotspots to look like a phone, StarLink, T-Mobile home, and direct Wi-Fi from a tower.

The direct wi-fi had the best connect, but was too slow. StarLink was great, but got too expensive for the price.

Currently I have a hacked hotspot with a AT&T unlimited plan ($35/month) and T-Mobile home internet that I cracked into to add external antennas ($55/month). Both together are still cheaper than StarLink, so until StarLink gets much faster speeds, I am happy with it and have a backup option.

If I were you, I'd try to get one of the T-Mobile modems with external antenna connections and a nice antenna to point at the tower. It should help a good bit with your connection. I have this antenna, but it looks like it is on backorder.

https://www.streakwave.com/quwireless-ap5g4-hp-5glte-mimo-4x4-5m

https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gateway-arcadyan-tmo-g4ar#rejoice!-t-mobile-has-made-installing-external-antennas-easy!

I used this guide to get the external antenna on my older T-Mobile modem.
https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots

Had great luck with Tmo home internet until they started doing maintenance on the tower near me. They admitted there was planned maintenance on the tower but would never give me any idea when it would be over. Felt bad for the foreigner who had to listen to me gripe (they probably put me on speaker phone and all got a laugh as it was the highlight of their 3rd world country day) but I dropped the home internet. Still have their cell service and can't complain.

TLDR: great service until it is unreliable.

I've had emails the past 3 days from TMo indicating that they're working on my local tower.

I haven't had any outages. Even with the maintenance, my current download speed is 501 Mbps.

We tried T-Mobile when we first moved to our house. We could only get 2 bars and that was putting it on the opposite side of the garage.

Switch to Starlink and haven't had any issues.

Wife works from home and is on Teams all day. She doesn't have any issues.

I'm not sure what our speeds are running but I've got it going through a Eero extenders and we've had 2 TV's streaming and a kid playing Fortnite without any problems.

Starlink is expensive but it works.

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Currently I have a hacked hotspot

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Tell me more

I've got a modem running open-source software (OpenWRT variant), and I've customized the hotspot to incorporate the extra IMEI of my iPhone 13 (which has both a digital and physical IMEI, so there are two). Depending on your service provider, the only additional step is adjusting the TTL to match what the carrier requires to prevent hotspot data leakage. Once completed, the service provider recognizes your hotspot as a phone rather than a dedicated hotspot, allowing you to use a phone plan for it.

I went with AT&T since my family is on it. Adding the unlimited line is $35/month. I've been using it for about 2 years without issues.

While this "hack" does go against the providers terms of service, it is not illegal.

I learned a lot from this FB group.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/imeimagic

Thanks, that's super helpful. Currently overseas and getting ready to spend some time in Texas before heading back out later and have been trying to figure out some internet/phone options