Other hotspots, including everything the virtual carriers sell, use three- or four-year-old modems with lower speeds and worse signal strength than the best new phones. The best 4G hotspots, including the MiFi 8000 and MiFi 8800L, use the Qualcomm X20 or X24 modems. Both are generations behind the latest phones, but they're the best you can get now. The newer Netgear M6 runs the Qualcomm Snapdragon X62. Quality 5G hotspots such as the Verizon Orbic Speed 5G UW Mobile Hotspot use the Qualcomm X55 modem. That means recent phones will get better speeds than older hotspots do. The three big carriers have been frantically upgrading their networks recently, and in many cases, network capabilities have now outstripped the quality of older hotspots running on them. And folks who can't get the carriers' dedicated wireless internet plans might still find they can fall back on hotspots. Vacation home and RV owners might also use hotspots for roaming, part-time homesteads. Now, food trucks and other outdoor-dwelling small businesses use hotspots to light up their POS systems and get Seamless orders. So, who's using hotspots for now? Traditionally, it was just road warriors-business people who needed reliable connections for multiple devices without draining their phones' batteries. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all sell wireless home internet in various parts of the country, along with a wide range of smaller, local wireless internet service providers (WISPs). Recent wireless internet plans are more likely to have unlimited data than hotspot plans. It relies on exterior antennas, and larger, less portable routers that stay in one location. However, there is such a thing as wireless home internet, and it's different from hotspots. That said, if your needs don't involve video or music streaming, a wireless hotspot might be a viable alternative for your home. All of those Zoom calls for work and school are also likely to eat up a data cap quickly. The median US home broadband subscriber uses more than 397GB of data per month, mostly because of video streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix. They cost much more per byte than a home DSL or cable setup. Hotspot plans aren't designed for primary home use. After that, the carriers deprioritize your data or throttle it unpredictably depending on local network traffic. If you add a hotspot onto an "unlimited" phone plan, you get up to 50GB of high-speed data with Verizon, up to 50GB of data with AT&T, and up to 40GB with T-Mobile. That gets you the most data for your dollar. On AT&T and Verizon, your best bet is to add a hotspot to your existing carrier's phone plan as a separate line. Hotspots are available from all three nationwide carriers and several virtual operators that use the larger carriers' networks.Īlong with the three major carriers, you can get hotspots from Boost (AT&T/T-Mobile), Cricket (AT&T), H2O (AT&T), Karma (T-Mobile), Metro (T-Mobile), Net10 (Verizon), and Simple Mobile (T-Mobile), along with other minor players. With that in mind, here's what you need to know to pick the right service and hardware, along with the top-rated hotspots we've tested.
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