I’m looking for a internet solution for my parents who live in the sticks. I have almost a full 4G signal when I’m at their house with no issues (my carrier is T-Mobile), and I get 50gig unrestricted a month, anything over that is potentially throttled depending on tower usage at the time.
That said, I’m looking at something on Amazon like the Dionlink 4G LTE CPE Unlocked 4G Wireless Router with SIM Card Slot, supports AT&T and T-Mobile.
The question in regards to the above Hot Spot device; Do I need a SIM card programmed for Hot Spot or can I use a Phone SIM programmed card, and it can just use the data on the account?
I also asked over on the Amazon product page to see if one of the current product owners could chime in with an answer, but nothing yet.
EDIT: Also, a phone with hot spot turned on, isn’t going to have a very good signal, and will work in a few rooms in their house, and won’t work with the rest. Need a solution that also has at least 1 RJ45 connection.
SIM cards are all the same and if they can make or receive SMS and calls depends on the operator and not the hardware. I have a portable 4G Huawei modem and in the dashboard of that thing there’s a section for SMS because my provider sends me some if I’m about to be out of data or for other kind of reports.
If the modem allows I think you could even hook up an home phone to it and receive the calls made to the sim card inside the modem.
I think you can get the best data plan regadless of the sim card and it will work inside an household modem.
@HopnDude (or anyone else that might happen to know) – I’m looking at this option and wondering if you were able to confirm whether or not the carrier would throttle after exceeding the hotspot limit, or the overall data limit or cap for the plan, when the sim is running in an LTE router. From what I can gather or guess it should he the overall data throttle cap (we have [giant quotation marks] “unlimited”), but it’s obvious why providers wouldn’t want you doing this (can they detect it?), and I can’t find any recent account of someone trying it.
I only have experience with Three UK, I don’t know how they do hotspot detection, but it didn’t work on rooted Cyanogenmod and OpenWRT, so I could use their unlimited plan without restrictions.
On a stock Samsung phone with hotspot enabled, the same SIM would throttle.
I guess my point is - try a router with OpenWRT (it’s a bit hard to set up 4G, though).