Internet for when your internet goes down. | Image: T-Mobile T-Mobile’s big home internet push continues, now with a new way to sign up for the service: as a backup option. The company is offering a new Home Internet Backup plan starting at $30 per month (including an autopay discount) that’s designed to supplement your cable or fiber internet connection in the event of an outage. Seems handy if your internet is down a lot! But it also seems like overkill for most people, especially considering that most of T-Mobile’s phone plans already come with plenty of mobile hotspot data. Like T-Mobile’s ..read more

Illustration: The Verge AST SpaceMobile has ramped up demonstrations of voice calls, texts, and video calls via satellite over the last year, using 4G LTE and 5G connections with download bandwidth reaching 14Mbps. Now the company says that a previous memorandum of understanding with AT&T to work on a space-based broadband network for phones has become a “definitive commercial agreement,” just in time for AST’s first five commercial satellites to launch this summer. The FCC has gotten things rolling on a framework (PDF) for companies interested in building these types of services, with the ..read more

The carriers are at it again. | Illustration: The Verge AT&T has a new optional feature for some of its plans. It’s called Turbo, and for $7 per month, it provides “better speed and stability” for a line of service by upgrading your data plan to “performance data.” AT&T pitches it as an add-on to help with demanding applications, like gaming. Okay, but what exactly is “performance data?” It’s kind of unclear. But we can sort of piece it together based on what it isn’t. If you were hoping Turbo could help boost service on a prepaid or entry-level postpaid plan, I have bad news. It’s onl ..read more

Home internet for when you’re not at home. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has announced two new home internet plans: Home Internet Plus and Away. Well, technically that’s one home internet plan and one anywhere-but-home plan. These new flavors of T-Mobile’s 5G-powered internet service aim to address different customers, but both serve the same goal: leveraging that sweet 5G spectrum to do more than just keep our phones connected. The new Away plan, importantly, does not allow for “extended use in the same location,” according to a footnote in T-Mobile’s press release. It’s ..read more

T-Mobile wants to be more than just your network. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile wants you to see it as more than a wireless company, so it’s flattering its customers with status. The company is launching a new program called Magenta Status, which includes a set of new perks for subscribers as well as the benefits already offered by T-Mobile Tuesdays. The company is partnering with Hilton, Hertz, and Live Nation to offer discounts, which can all be managed by the rebranded T-Mobile Tuesdays app, now called T Life. Only T-Mobile’s own subscribers will be eligible for Magenta S ..read more

Comcast can still use “10G” to describe products and services, so long as it’s being used accurately. | Image: Xfinity Creative Comcast has agreed to abandon its “Xfinity 10G network” product branding after advertising watchdogs concluded that it could cause consumers to think they will all experience “significantly faster speeds than are available on 5G networks,” which isn’t true. On Wednesday, the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) ruled that Comcast should discontinue the term “10G” both when describing the Xfinity network and within the name of its Xfinity 10G Network service itself ..read more

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge EchoStar Corporation announced today that it finalized its purchase of Dish Network on the last day of December. Following the merger, which the companies announced in August, Dish is now a “wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar,” and why? 5G, dear reader. Dish Network was known as EchoStar until 2008 when it renamed itself to Dish and spun its satellite internet business off under the EchoStar name. In recent years, Dish has been pivoting to 5G after buying Boost Mobile and starting Project Genesis, which, in concept, would offer a fourth large network to ..read more

Illustration by Sisi Kim for The Verge Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It’ll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was v ..read more

Qualcomm names its ARM PC platform Snapdragon X. | Screenshot by Wes Davis / The Verge Qualcomm says it has a new name for the next generation of its ARM PC platform: Snapdragon X. The platform is based on the Oryon CPU tech from its 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, a company founded by former Apple engineers who had previously worked on Apple’s A-series iPhone and iPad chips. Arm has filed a lawsuit against both companies over the deal that is set to go to trial in September 2024. Snapdragon X is a direct salvo aimed at Apple’s M-series chips, which Apple debuted in its MacBook Air in 2020. And if ..read more

AST SpaceMobile used an ordinary Samsung Galaxy S22 to make the call. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge AST SpaceMobile — a cellular satellite company backed by AT&T — has placed a satellite call over 5G, marking the “first ever” 5G connection between an unmodified smartphone and a satellite in space. To conduct the test, AST SpaceMobile used a Galaxy S22. It made the call on September 8th, 2023, from a wireless dead zone in Maui, Hawaii, with its recipient located in Madrid, Spain. AST SpaceMobile got the cell signal to its destination by leveraging its low Earth orbit test satellite ..read more