Ask Slashdot: LTE Hotspot As Sole Cellular Connection?

New submitter iamacat writes I am thinking of canceling my regular voice plan and using an LTE hotspot for all my voice and data needs. One big draw is ability to easily use multiple devices without expensive additional lines or constantly swapping SIMs. So I can have an ultra compact Android phone and an iPod touch and operate whichever has the apps I feel like using. Or, if I anticipate needing more screen real estate, I can bring only a Nexus 7 or a laptop and still be able to make and receive VoIP calls. When I am home or at work, I would be within range of regular WiFi and not need to eat into the data plan or battery life of the hotspot.

Has anyone done something similar? Did the setup work well? Which devices and VoIP services did you end up using? How about software for automatic WiFi handoffs between the hotspot and regular home/work networks?

Comments

"Always on" may be a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

I considered doing what you're suggesting a little while ago. I'm the iOS ecosystem though, so this may not apply to Android, but the biggest problem I found with this is if you're using a hotspot for your data, that not all your devices will remain connected all the time - they will likely connect periodically to download email or receive push notifications, but they're not 24x7 connected via Wi-Fi. As such, if you're relying on a VoIP app to handle incoming calls, you may miss some.

Again, this was my experience with iOS a little while back - some jailbreak tweaks helped but killed battery life.

Re:"Always on" may be a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd highly recommend NOT doing this unless you have some magical "unmetered" LTE plan.

1) Operating system updates tend to come in at around half a gig, twice a month, regardless of the device.
2) Software updates on top of OS updates tend to needlessly update to add features (not just fix bugs) and you have to take all the updates or none of them. (As an example, the "Simpsons Tapped out" game is over 1GB, and you can't continue to play it without updating it every week.

Assuming there is free WiFi in your immediate area in which to use instead of LTE, you could push those updates off to the WiFi end, but where there's free WiFi there's usually 50 other people on it.

The other problem with going LTE fulltime for your internet needs is that the latency is often worse than DSL, and about on-par with Cable, but not everywhere has good LTE speeds. Like where I live I can easily get 75Mb down and 30up, which is FAR superior to what the cable and DSL providers offer, but since they only offer at most 3GB cap, it would be burned up in about one day of normal use. I take that back, the largest cap offered is 30GB which comes in at 190$ for that part of the plan (on top of 60$ per device) So 250$/mo for 30GB, nuh uh. I can get both Cable and xDSL's 400GB caps for that price.

not reliable enough

[silfen]

I haven't found portable hotspots to be reliable enough for voice in the past, but YMMV.

Why not just get a voice+data plan and use the phone as the hotspot for all your other devices?

Re:not reliable enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much this.

Nokia Lumina 521: $50->Comes with T-Mobile SIM.

$30 prepaid minutes card later and you have a cheap mobile phone which has GPS navigation, voice calls, incredible battery life, and the ability to do Wifi Tethering for you Chromebook/Laptop/Android/iPad/whatever. It's windows phone so you won't be tempted to kill your battery with stupid apps and you can use your Android/Apple devices for non-essential playtime.

Windows Phone has a good enough web browser: you'll probably find yourself leaving your other devices at home except for rare occasions. Whatsapp and google hangouts are the only apps I miss, and I can wifi tether my chromebook if I want to do a google hangout.

Depends on if you want to get calls...

[aaarrrgggh]

If you don't need to receive calls, you can control use pretty well and maybe make it work for slightly less money.

Speaking from personal experience while traveling though, it is really a pain, especially for a prolonged period of time. If you have a specific need to use multiple devices for non overlapping functions (laptop, phone, tablet) where the functions really can't be done on a single device then the MiFi is cheaper than getting three SIMs. The only time I broke down and went this route in the last 10 years was in Sydney, where the hotel charged around $25 for wifi, and I only had one Australian SIM card that would work.

Convenience or cost...

I did the same thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Heya. I actually did this with Verizon, back in 2012. I was seventeen shades of paranoid back then about the whole NSA scandal (with reason), so I bought my sisters old Galaxy S2, removed the SIM, and piggy-backed off my VZ hotspot. I was using Callcentric as my VoIP provider.

I would say that the idea was nice, but that it could have worked out better. Maybe it was that I was using Verizon, but the call quality was like a rollercoaster. I had bounceback issues, echoes, and some automated phone systems wouldn't recognize my DTMF tones. It's an idea I'd like to visit again, in the future, but I think the LTE nets aren't the best bet for VoIP. At least, not yet. I also ran into issues where my hotspot would hibernate, or just drain in no time. You should also take into account how fast your WiFi drains your phone, and how often the interface suspends.

If you can get past all that, give it a whirl. I'd like to try this again one day, myself. My suggestion is to avoid using Verizon as a test bed.

Hope this helps. :)

- Asura

Do they make high-quality LTE bridges?

[swb]

By LTE bridge, I mean some device that can take a SIM and that has an Ethernet port for connecting your own wireless router? Something designed to be used in a "production" setting where reliability of the LAN side of connectivity needs to be high.

I've not used a MiFi(TM) or other portable hotspot, but on every iPhone with tethering I've used (up to 5S) the wireless portion of it leaves something to be desired. No wireless signal showing up without toggling tethering on/off a second time, loss of wireless with inactivity and of course the signal range leaves something to be desired due to the limited antenna of a cell phone.

And then there's the general lack of configurability relative to even the dumbest wireless router.

I figure somebody must make something like this for industrial/commercial use.

I won't comment on the inherent limits of relative to data caps, since that will get beat to death here but that's the other side of the coin.

I don't know where you live (I assume the U.S.).

[Sique]

But here around (Austria in Europe), we have providers that actually offer such services: An hotspot device hooked on LTE and a quite generous data plan. The device itself is not supposed to be mobile (needs a wall socket for power), but all the other components are there: see this or that.

I do this - but with multiple 4G contracts

[rapiddescent]

Your Mileage Will Vary depending on where you are located; but I use 4G and 3G connections here in Scotland and in other parts of Europe and I never use WiFi hotspots.

1. Everything Everywhere Kite (a Huawei mifi device that looks like an iphone 4s)

2: unlocked Huawei E3276 with an external antenna

3: backup USB Huawei E353 devices (also with a CRC9 antenna connector)

All work with my Linux distro (Fedora) natively. So my EE contract allows VOIP (in plain) but the O2 contract does not. So I also have a bunch of SIM cards that also helps if I am in a zone with poor coverage for a particular operator. Maxes out at about 50 Mbs in good 4G areas but bear in mind that the latency is often a lot higher (10x) than copper connections and will make VOIP a bit laggier than you'd expect, even with a high bandwidth connection.

Just use the keyboard...!

[allquixotic]

The keyboard?! How quaint!

In all seriousness: if you don't have an unlimited data plan, you're probably going to blow your data allowance, unless by some miracle you've found a provider that values 1 GB of LTE at an order of magnitude (or more) less than $10 per GB.

If you had an unlimited data plan, you would ideally be able to use the Hotspot feature that's built into nearly every smartphone these days, and forego the hotspot. On Verizon it's an extra $30/mo for hotspot tethering on a stock firmware for phones that aren't rooted, but totally worth it for the benefit you get. This is my primary (only) Internet connection. You could make yours the same if you had unlimited data. It's not new or far-fetched at all.

In fact, if the carriers *did* reduce the amortized cost of 1 GB of data transfer on LTE by a factor of 10 or more, I'd be willing to bet that we would see many millions of people signing up for *limited* data plans on the order of 100 - 150 GB and tethering through their phones or using a hotspot as their primary internet connection. Right now it's simply too much money to get "limited" data plans -- on Verizon XLTE with the MORE plan, you can get like 100 GB for $700/month. It's still way too much money for too little data. Until and unless the prices become somewhat reasonable, so it "only" costs you $2 to watch that Netflix video instead of $20, we will mostly see unlimited data plans as the only users of LTE as their primary connection.

Don't

[bmajik]

I've had a Verizon 4G LTE hotspot as my sole home internet for the last year. It is the only type of service available where I currently live.

It is expensive and unreliable.

I live in a rural area. I am using an external LTE antenna on the device. I can see that the LTE signal is moderate to good where I am; the problems I am having do not seem to be LTE signal related.

The device itself is about as reliable as other consumer level networking gear -- meaning you need to power cycle it now and then to make it start working again. It has a remote web admin interface, with no way to remotely reboot it. You have to physically touch the thing to power cycle it.

I don't know what's available where you are, but here, Verizon charges me for every byte that goes through that LTE connection, in both directions. I think they're overcharging me, but I have no realistic power to do anything about that, because they are Verizon and I am not. Overages are excessively expensive. My bill for last month was $250. We watch no streaming videos at my house -- not even youtube.

The device stops responding to pings from certain nodes on my internal network, causing all kinds of networking fun. DNS queries randomly fail during logical browsing sessions. I've investigated all of this thoroughly with tcpdump and other tools. This happens on clients of multiple types - OSX, WinRT, Windows, OpenBSD.

So near as I can tell, the box itself is just shit. There have been 2 or 3 firmware updates for it in the year that I've depended on it for my internet. None of them have improved the symptoms I describe.

It's a Pantech MHS291LVW

The entire time I've had it, I've been researching how to replace it with something that isn't Verizon. I'm nearly done with that plan; I'll be backhauling a nearby DSL service back to my site using a 3.5 mile p2p wireless link. I'm paying to upgrade the site infrastructure and wiring at both ends of the link. I am spending thousands of dollars to do this.

My neighbors also have Verizon LTE service. They have the VZN Home Broadband service, where Verizon will mount an antenna at your site and do the install themselves, and the CPE has 4 switched Ethernet ports in addition to WiFi. They haven't complained about the reliability as much, but the price is still too high.

You can only get that hardware from Verizon in my area if you agree to a 3 year contract. I didn't and won't ever agree to any contract with any US mobile operator, so, I couldn't get the VZN home broadband hardware, which may be more reliable than the Hotspot hardware.

They are not power users; they are a young family with ipads for their kids. They recently shared with me that they just had an $800 monthly bill.

If you have any wired broadband choice available to you, take it.

Re:Don't

[pla]

It is expensive and unreliable.

The combined 4G/802.11 hotspots you get from the cell carriers pretty much suck across the board.

Get a Cradlepoint router and a compatible USB 4G modem (under $100 total). It takes the USB in from the modem, and gives you 4 ethernet ports plus WiFi, and knows enough to reset the stupid 4G modem when it has its hourly crash. Net result, near perfect uptime, weather aside. Oh, and and use a 6ft USB cable to move the modem a bit away from the router if you plan to use the WiFi feature of it - People have reported the two interfere with each other and greatly reduce the performance of each unless you separate them by a few feet.

That said, yes, still expensive. But like you, I have no alternatives, so if I need to pay for it, it may as well work.