One of the only good unlocked hotspots with international bands available in the US is the Netgear M5, but it's quite expensive. US hotspots generally allow you to roam in Canada and Mexico, although rates may be high-make sure to check with your carrier in advance to find out. And check out our tips on how to turn your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot. To help narrow down your decision, head over to our explainer on the tethering vs. That said, phones support fewer devices at once, have fewer network management features, and can run out of battery quite quickly. Smartphones have a Wi-Fi hotspot mode, and if you have a 5G phone, you might get better performance in that mode than you would with a 4G hotspot. If you decide to make the jump, hotspots and cellular modems aren't the only options. That said, we've never found a real use for that media server functionality. You can use hotspots with big batteries as power banks to charge your phone or hotspots with microSD card slots as tiny servers to share media over Wi-Fi. Those features are on pretty much all dedicated routers nowadays, but you can't take them for granted on mobile hotspots. Some hotspots also support guest networks and access controls, such as MAC filtering and time-based access controls. Make sure your hotspot supports 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is typically faster and less congested than 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, 5G hotspots that support millimeter-wave generally don't have external antenna ports. TS9 is a standard, and these antennas cost much less than a cellular signal booster does. Many high-quality hotspots have TS9 external antenna ports to help you improve your signal using inexpensive antennas you can purchase online. That means you may get 5Mbps to 10Mbps whereas your phone gets 25Mbps to 30Mbps, for instance. Other hotspots out there, including everything the virtual carriers currently sell, use three- or four-year-old modems that have 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. That's two generations behind the latest phones, but it's the best you can get right now. Quality 5G hotspots such as the Verizon Orbic Speed 5G UW Mobile Hotspot and Netgear M5 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. Now that road warriors are out and about again, these devices are more important than ever. And folks who can't get the carriers' dedicated wireless internet plans may still find they fall back on hotspots. Vacation home and RV owners might also use hotspots for their roaming, part-time homesteads. Now, food trucks and other outdoor-dwelling small businesses use hotspots to light up their POS systems and get their Seamless orders. So, who's using hotspots, for now? Before COVID-19, it was road warriors-business people who need reliable connections on the go that support multiple devices and don't drain their phones' batteries. AT&T (Opens in a new window), T-Mobile, and Verizon (Opens in a new window) 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 truly unlimited data than hotspot plans. It relies on larger, less portable routers that generally stay in one location. There is such a thing as wireless home internet, however, and it's differently from hotspots. But if they do, you are going to quickly run up against those data bucket limits. So, if your needs don't involve video or music streaming, a wireless hotspot may be a viable alternative for your home. All of those Zoom calls for work and school are likely to eat up a data cap quickly, as well. The median US home broadband subscriber uses more than 355GB of data per month (Opens in a new window), 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.
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