Buy Hotspot Device
During congestion, hotspot users may notice lower speeds than other customers, and further reduction for heavy data users (>50GB/mo. for most plans), due to data prioritization; see plan for details. High-speed data on our network up to monthly allowance, then max 2G speeds for Mobile Internet plans and max 3G speeds for Mobile Hotspot.
buy hotspot device
All our phone plans include hotspot data that lets you securely share your phone's internet connection with up to 10 other devices when you have a signal on T-Mobile's nationwide network. Plus, it's easy to add more data when you need it with plan add-ons or upgrades.
All our phone plans include hotspot data that lets you securely share your phone's internet connection with up to 10 other devices when you have a signal on T-Mobile's nationwide network. Plus, it's easy to add more data when you need it with plan add-ons or upgrades.
By turning your smartphone into a mobile hotspot, you can securely share your smartphone's internet connection with up to ten devices on T-Mobile's high-speed nationwide network. Most of our current phone plans include 5 GB of high-speed mobile hotspot data and 3G data speeds after.
Your hotspot device's speed and connection will depend on your device's capability. T-Mobile offers both 4G LTE and 5G hotspot devices based on your needs. If you're looking for fast 5G speeds on America's largest 5G network, check out the 5G-capable INSEEGO 5G Mifi M2000, which can wirelessly connect up to 30 devices at a time and has a powerful battery to keep you connected all day long.
If you're looking for 4G LTE connectivity, we offer the Franklin T9, which supports up to 15 wireless-device connections, as well as the Alcatel Linkzone 2, which supports up to 16 wireless-device connections. Check them out to find the hotspot device that best fits your needs.
MiFi is a registered trademark that many people use to refer to a hotspot device. Both MiFi devices and hotspot devices allow you to connect to the internet on the go by creating a secure wireless network for you, your family, or friends.
By turning your phone into a mobile hotspot, your family and friends can use your connection when they don't have access to a public Wi-Fi network or cellular network of their own. Here's how to set it up:
Check out our mobile hotspot troubleshooting page to walk through some simple troubleshooting steps to get you back online and connected. If you're still experiencing problems, call us at 1-877-746-0909. It's best if you can call from a different phone than the one you are having issues with.
Hotspot devices, mobile hotspots, and their plans were made for limited high-speed data usage on the go. These are not intended to replace your home internet. For a high-speed internet connection at home, check out -mobile.com/home-internet to see if it's available in your area.
Hotspots can connect more than just laptops to the web. They also work with a tablet, a camera, and pretty much any other Wi-Fi-enabled device. They support more devices at one time than your phone's hotspot mode, don't drain your phone's battery, and can hook up with the better antennas from your phone. Your company might even cover its service plan.
Along with the three major carriers, you can get hotspots from Boost (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.
Hotspot plans change all the time. On AT&T and Verizon, your best bet is to add your hotspot line to your existing carrier's phone plan, as a separate line. That gets you the most data for your dollar. If you add a hotspot onto an "unlimited" phone plan, you get up to 50GB of high-speed data with Verizon, up to 40GB of data with AT&T, and 40GB with T-Mobile. After that, the carriers deprioritize your data or throttle it unpredictably. (T-Mobile's Magenta Max plan says it has truly unlimited data, but it isn't designed for use on dedicated hotspot devices and so you may get cut off unexpectedly.) You can find more details on the carriers' constantly changing hotspot plans at RVMobileInternet.com(Opens in a new window).
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. All of those Zoom calls for work and school are likely to eat up a data cap quickly, as well. So, if your needs don't involve video or music streaming, a wireless hotspot may be a viable alternative for your home. But if they do, you are going to quickly run up against those data bucket limits.
There is such a thing as wireless home internet, however, and it's differently from hotspots. It relies on larger, less portable routers that generally stay in one location. Recent wireless-internet plans are more likely to have truly unlimited data than hotspot plans. 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).
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. That means recent phones will get better speeds than older hotspots do.
Quality 5G hotspots such as the Verizon Orbic Speed 5G UW Mobile Hotspot and Netgear M5 use the Qualcomm X55 modem. That's two generations behind the latest phones, but it's the best you can get right now.
The best 4G hotspots, including the MiFi 8000 and MiFi 8800L, use the Qualcomm X20 or X24 modems. 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. That means you may get 5Mbps to 10Mbps whereas your phone gets 25Mbps to 30Mbps, for instance.
Many high-quality hotspots have TS9 external antenna ports to help you improve your signal using inexpensive antennas you can purchase online. TS9 is a standard, and these antennas cost much less than a cellular signal booster does. Unfortunately, 5G hotspots that support millimeter-wave generally don't have external antenna ports.
Make sure your hotspot supports 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is typically faster and less congested than 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Some hotspots also support guest networks and access controls, such as MAC filtering and time-based access controls. Those features are on pretty much all dedicated routers nowadays, but you can't take them for granted on mobile hotspots.
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. That said, we've never found a real use for that media server functionality.
We really like the displays on the front of many current hotspots. They often report the strength of your signal, your hotspot's name, data usage statistics, and the network password right on the device.
If you decide to make the jump, hotspots and cellular modems aren't the only options. 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. That said, phones support fewer devices at once, have fewer network management features, and can run out of battery quite quickly.
One of the only good unlocked hotspots with international bands available in the US is the Netgear M5, but it's quite expensive. If you plan to buy a local SIM to take advantage of much lower local data rates, you may want to buy a cheap Android phone abroad and use it as a hotspot, instead.
Battery life: Your hotspot should be able to last a full workday and give you plenty of breathing room. Though 10 hours advertised run time is the absolute minimum worth considering, the best hotspots can approach 20 hours.
Universal charging: The large battery on most hotspots should also be able to lend a charge to a phone or tablet over standard USB cables, by which we mean USB-C, now the standard for charging laptops and Android phones.
The real reason to get this hotspot, advanced age and all, is the choice of high-usage-friendly rate plans that Verizon introduced in July 2021. But if you want the best prices on large amounts of data, you need to have an existing monthly unlimited plan with Verizon.
Otherwise, the M2000 offers a pleasant experience. All of our test devices connected to its primary network on the first try and stayed connected. The M2000 supports the current Wi-Fi 6 standard, a bit of future-proofing that allows for better performance and reliability as you upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 devices.
You can also connect a device via USB tethering: Plug a cable into the hotspot and the device, and then select Access internet (USB & WiFi) and OK in the menu on the M2000. In our tests that method worked on the first try with our HP laptop. The same USB-C port can recharge an external device, but after connecting the gadget in question, you need to remember to choose that option (select Universal Charging on the touchscreen and then tap OK); otherwise, the hotspot will charge from the connected device instead.
New hotspots come out less frequently than new smartphones, and many hotspot models for sale at the big three carriers have been out for more than a year. With both AT&T and Verizon having finally introduced C-band 5G hotspots (which we look forward to testing soon), only T-Mobile is in line to ship a new hotspot anytime soon.
At all three carriers, you can still find older hotspots that lack touchscreens and charge via old-school Micro-USB cables. Those models are now sufficiently far behind the times in their support for LTE and Wi-Fi standards that you should avoid them entirely. 041b061a72