That’s not a must-have feature, but it can reduce the anxiety factor of loaning your bandwidth to somebody you just met. AdvertisementĪnother minor niggle: you can’t set up a guest network with an alternate password, an option that competing hotspots allow, such as our AT&T runner-up.
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It’s overall a huge step down from the AT&T ZTE Velocity’s responsive touchscreen interface, but at least you don’t have to tinker with it all that often.
THE WIRECUTTER APPS PASSWORD
Also, to edit the default and random alphanumeric password and change other advanced settings, you need to connect to the hotspot and log in to a “my.jetpack” site. Those left, select, and right buttons often fail to register a touch, and exiting a dialog requires stepping down a menu to choose an “Exit” option. The user interface-a non-touch screen controlled by annoying capacitive buttons with no tactile feel-is a minor annoyance at best. Overall, the Jetpack is a great hotspot, but we do have some gripes. If you already have a phone and 2 GB of data, adding the Jetpack and another 4 GB puts another $50 on your bill adding the hotspot and 8 GB increases your total by $80. A hotspot by itself with 4 GB of data will cost $50 a month. You’ll need to put the Jetpack on a More Everything plan, with or without a Verizon phone, where you pay $20 for the hotspot’s monthly “line access” fee and then buy data as needed. And the 6620L shares power via a USB port to charge other devices from its 4,000-mAh battery. The 16 hours and 8 minutes of LTE sharing we saw didn’t meet Verizon’s advertised 20-hour battery life but was still about an hour better than any competitor we tested. This is notable as most hotspots, including AT&T’s, are limited to just 10 devices, and some, like T-Mobile’s current best offering, even lack the 5GHz band. Devices connected without a hitch and then stayed online. The Jetpack supports 15 devices over either 2.4 or 5GHz Wi-Fi and allows USB tethering.
THE WIRECUTTER APPS FULL
The Verizon Jetpack 6620L-$50 on a two-year contract, $200 full price-offers longer battery life (two full work days) than any other hotspot on the most reliable network with the best combination of coverage and speed.
THE WIRECUTTER APPS ANDROID
We spent a few months with AT&T’s Velocity and Verizon’s Jetpack 6620L, using loaner devices with a MacBook Air, an iPad mini, two Android phones, and one Android tablet around Washington DC, New York, the Bay Area, Las Vegas (during CES, which is basically a worst case scenario torture test for these devices given the massive amount of simultaneous data users) and a few spots in between. (For more on this, check out our guide to the best wireless carriers.)
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TheLTE networks of T-Mobile and Sprint, even after recent progress, can’t match the big two’s rural coverage-important in a device used often on the road. Verizon gives you better odds in that respect. However, keep in mind that unlike with cellphone coverage, coverage at the destination is more important than coverage at home and work (where you presumably have Wi-Fi).
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It also ended an advertising scheme to track subscribers’ unencrypted Internet use, while Verizon took until January to announce an opt-out. PCMag ranked it faster in Charlotte, Indianapolis, Raleigh, and its “ suburban/rural northeast” region, and we found it much speedier than Verizon in the Bay Area during research for this guide ( checks in San Francisco and Palo Alto averaged 33.09 Mbps down and 15.23 Mbps up for AT&T, versus 5.53 Mbps down and 2.85 Mbps up for Verizon). RootMetrics clocked it from 10-20 Mbps in 79 of 125 markets, with 20+ Mbps in another 14–and in some parts of the US it’s superior to Verizon. It even exceeded 20 Mbps in 40 of those markets.ĪT&T, however, isn’t far behind. According to RootMetrics’ automated drive testing, Verizon’s network averaged between 10 and 20 megabits per second in 82 out of 125 networks tested. Our best-wireless-carrier research and outside reports like PCMag’s “Fastest Mobile Networks” and RootMetrics’ testing all pointed to Verizon. How we picked and testedīecause reliable coverage where you need it is the most important thing to look for in a hotspot, we started with networks. Think two full days of work versus five hours. But if you work on the road a lot, a hotspot offers a more reliable data connection than your phone and will run for much longer on a single charge than a phone in tethering mode. Just about every smartphone can act as a hotspot, sharing its connection over Wi-Fi with tablets or laptops.