Reaching out to the mind of SF please. We currently have a landline, with Wi-Fi router for internet, all bundled. Thinking we need to set up a wireless hotspot ? As we have been having issues with our provider and we are looking for other options. What do you all recommend?

What sort of internet connection do you have? Cable?

If you get a wifi hotspot it will work over cellular. The speeds are okay but not perfect. If you go through a main carrier you will be throttled when you use too much data.

However, I have no cable or other high speed available. So I have been using multiple hotspots from Unlimited4gLTE.com. It's been okay. They occasionally have to refresh the hotspot when I lose internet. Once it took them almost a week and they were less than friendly in their response, telling me to not send multiple messages. But overall it works since I really have no other options.

It’s a phone connection,not cabl, we are out in the county, so our choices are limited.

I have a Zing hotspot with a built in router but it has issues. I now rely on the hotspot of my iPhone to provide an Internet connection for my laptop. A much better solution. I can allow other folks to simultaneously use my iPhone hotspot too.

Just ran Speedtest: 153 Mbps download, 7.23 Mbps upload. Plenty fast enough for me. Sprint service.

I use a Netgear Nighthawk router with OTR Mobile service. I'm currently using their ATT service, but they have TMobile as well with 5G speed (I don't have it in my area yet so I haven't switched) and the Nighthawk is 5G. No throttling, no download caps. Its mobile too so I use it on the road! 60 bucks a month and my speeds vary from about 5mps to 70mps on 4G LTE.

Thanks for all the info. I will have to do some checking to see what’s available in our area and prices. Right now, we have ATT for mobile device as a backup, but the phone bundled services with wireless dsl for main internet. Wanted a backup plan in case I had issues again with the main ISP, as I’m working from home now.

Edite to add: Just had internet upgrade finally corrected with the main ISP. Download speed at 44mbps, and upload speed 3.25. At least it’s MUCH faster that what we had before. Just wanted an alternative to the main one.

quote:

Originally posted by m1009:
It’s a phone connection,not cabl, we are out in the county, so our choices are limited.

We live in very rural America. Our local phone company is so oversold on DSL that they aren't taking on new customers. And the speed is so horrible that it's useless anyway. We tried WiFi through a local company. I'm a half mile with line of sight to their tower right behind my fire department. Tower is 190' We had them for a couple years and as they added subscribers but not more capacity, it became unusable, especially on weekends. We tried a device from Verizon with an outside mounted dipole antenna. When it was first installed it was significantly better than the WiFi but after 2 antenna replacements and multiple complaints because again weekends became incredibly slow to the point pages would not load, we looked again for a solution.

Currently using a hot spot from ATT. It has to be placed in a window so it has a solid signal but it works very well. It costs about $70 a month but it is a metered connection so we have to limit watching movies or streaming music. It doesn't slow down, they just ding us for every 10 Gigs over our cap.

My mom and dad live in the middle of nowhere NC and use a version hotspot. It’s the size of a beeper and uses cell for their internet

When I was a cop, we used the same item for our in car computers networking...but I have no idea how expensive it was. I’m sure the city got a great rate because they had two hundred of them and Verizon had all the city’s cell phones too...

Wow, sounds like the hotspots are both expensive and not as reliable consistently. I will check out ATT, since I already have an account with them, but might still check out Verizon, etc. when our internet was down I was using the att, but it was at one bar, so that didn’t work that well either. Prob cause that is only emergency for us, in case the ISP went down. Which it did for 3 days, cause they hooked us up to the wrong hub, and then couldn’t figure out what happened, duh.

quote:

Originally posted by m1009:
Wow, sounds like the hotspots are both expensive and not as reliable consistently.

Depends.

I use a NetGear LB1120 4G LTE modem with T-Mobile and it's been every bit as reliable as our Comcast Business Class High-Speed Internet connection. I use it for automatic Internet connection fail-over for the rare instances our Comcast circuit goes down.

(It was cheap, for me, because I was able to add a line for free during a T-Mobile promotion.)

quote:

Originally posted by m1009:
I will check out ATT, since I already have an account with them, ...

One of my best friends has a bunch of acreage out in the middle of nowhere. The only half-way usable cell coverage on his property is AT&T. So we set him up with an AT&T 4G LTE hotspot. Bandwidth isn't terrific because the signal's marginal, but it otherwise works like a champ.

A bit spendy, though.

I use Comcast and my speeds are consistently 238 down and 12 up. Never able to tell if they were ever throttling it.

Comcast not available in our area. Plus I had so much trouble dealing with them when my parents had them, not a fan.

If you Google for "Mobley car connected", there should be threads on Reddit and Howard's forums on it. It's a bit tricky to get it as it is not an advertised program on AT&T but basically it's $20 a month postpaid (thus roaming if needed) unlimited AT&T hotspot.

I have been running it on an AT&T Nighthawk hotspot for several years now. Used up to 40 GB one month with no apparent throttling on a cross country trip. Total is around $23.54 a month after taxes.

There have been a couple other threads on this that I recall. I also live in an unincorporated area. The only "normal" internet available is DSL at 3 Mb, which sucks. We use this: https://www.unlimitedinternet4u.com/.

It is basically somebody reselling AT&T cell phone service. We bought the Netgear modem they're selling and a SIM card. We pay them via PayPal ($75/month I think). It is unlimited and we do not see throttling or prioritization. We use 100 GB+ per month and have for at least 18 months since switching to it.

The whole arrangement seems a little ...sketchy, but it works great and is the only way for us to have non-shitty internet.

Thanks, everyone! Looks like I will check around and see what is in our area.