Can I use a moblile hotspot to get my mom better internet?

In My Humble Opinion
1

She lives in an area of town where the best internet she can get is Verizon DSL. 3-4 mbps on a good day. It’s enough for the internet, she only goes on to go to the hometown page. But for Christimas this year we got her a suscription to NFHS, which lets her watch the high school sports in town. It won’t play more than 30 seconds before freezing.

My phone service is Tello. Unlimited data is $25 a month, and when the internet in my apartment has occasionally gone out, I use the mobiel hotspot. Why couldn’t I just add another line, get a cheap used phone for under $100, and let her use that? I don’t think she would come near using the monthly data limit, and even if she did, wouldn’t that just slow her internet speed?

2

You could even buy a router that take sim-cards.
I think the phone service may even sell them, with a sim only meant for data.
My provider does ( in Denmark, so different places ).

3

Don’t know your location, but T-Mobile and others have data plans that include a data receiver/router at somewhat reasonable prices. No phone needed.

4

I would think one issue would be reliability in the long term. A router is designed to work 24/7. A cell phone hotspot is typically just used for a short while. I wouldn’t expect the hotspot to be stable enough to set up and then it basically just works forever. The phone itself is going to want to reboot periodically for updates, which may require manual restarts of the hotspot. And I wouldn’t think a $100 phone would have the hardware designed for 24/7 hotspot functionality. If it was for you and you were comfortable with fiddling with the phone as necessary, then that might be okay. But if it’s for your mom who probably doesn’t want to mess with any of that, it probably wouldn’t work out all that well.

5

First go to the FCC National Broadband map and see who offers internet at her location:

Since this isn’t completely reliable also talk to the neighbors.

6

This. My wife and I did something like this recently for a relative in Japan. It plugs into the wall for power, connects to the cell network for internet access, and provides WiFi and ethernet connectivity for devices in your home.

7

I know nothing about Tello, but Google tells me it uses the T-Mobile network. T-Mobile offers home internet for 50 bucks a month.

Just a suggestion.

8

T-Mobile usually has a 14 day trial period. So you can see if it works well enough.

9

Your cell phone provider may offer unlimited data, but a lot of providers have been caught throttling users who try to use too much data. The videos still might end up stuttering.

Some of the mobile service providers have information about data throttling embedded in the fine print of your contract. It may be labeled as something like fair use or network protection or something about overloading the network. You might want to check their contract before going down that route.

10

When my Frontier service goes down I hotspot on a Verizon phone. But the connection is crawlingly slow on either of them. Check and make sure she’ll actually get faster speeds in her location from a hotspot – precise locations matter.

11

Yes, my daughter’s apartment internet went out and she hot-spotted for a while, but we learned that Mint turns off hotspotting at some limit, even on an unlimited plan. The OP will have to dog a little in the details.

12

Here is a useful source on the prepaid plans:

Thus if you click on the Tello $25 “Unlimited” plan it shows a hard hotspot limit of 5GB. Oddly the $20 Tello 15GB plan has a hard hotspot limit of 15 GB. So the OP might check the boxes for T-Mobile and Hotspot and then click on the individual entries to see what hotspot limit actually is. The US Mobile $37.50 Annual 100 GB plan has a hotspot limit of 50 GB so looks like a good deal–but I have no knowledge of this particular company. But otherwise it seems the plans either have high prices or low hotspot limits. Railer13 points out that T-Mobile offers home internet at $50/month. This would probably be the best option–but it’s not offered everywhere.

13

Okay, posting as a Former T-Mobile Tech Support agent (now quite a few years ago).

@PastTense has done good work on the details, so yes, I wouldn’t advise adding another line with Tello unless 5GB per month covers the usage fully. And streaming, depending on the quality, is one of the big data hogs. Assuming 720P, that’s roughly 5 hours of video (lots of caveats). Higher quality is more, lower is less (of course).

You’d also want to use T-Mobile’s coverage map on their website to check - it could be good, average, or poor, which will determine what sort of speeds they get, and of course, if the beater phone supports 5G and the other locally prominent bands.

Another thing - as a reseller, say, 95+% of the time, it’s not an issue. That last 5%… if there’s an outage, congestion, or other event in the area effecting coverage, well, the resellers get low priority, which is stated in their contracts. Again, -rarely- an issue, but it happens.

As for making it work - I have done this on a spare line, which had a 10G cap for data. I basically took the spare phone, turned off auto-updates for the OS and Apps, put it on a newly created Android Account NOT linked to my normal one (so if the phone went… astray… it didn’t have any of my personal info on it) and spent some time in the settings to make sure the Wifi hotspot went on and stayed on.

Then left it plugged in on a shelf at my father’s workshop so he’d have wifi for his security camera (long story). It worked… okay. If there was a power failure, he was good enough to be able to restart the phone and about half the time, it would work without needing anything else. But the other half of the time, I’d have to go fiddle with it because something hadn’t come back up properly.

So, you known your mom better than we do. Is she comfy with these things? If not, is she good at following instructions if you walk her through it on another line (no judgement, my in-laws are pretty good at this, my mother and father are TERRIBLE at it, thank god for TeamViewer)?

And how does your mom view the NFHS? On a phone, a tablet, a Smart TV or stick on a Dumb TV? Does she normally use a wireless connection or ethernet connection for her DSL? All these things matter especially if she’s not comfy with the tech.

In that case, then yeah, if the T-Mobile (other carriers are offering similar service depending on area as well) 5G internet is available in her area, it provides ethernet and wifi service in a single device. It may be the easiest set up, and while I’m no longer part of their tech team, she’ll at least be able to get help with it, which will likely NOT be case if she’s trying to just use mobile hot spot.

14

Here are three different 5G options that I monthly receive ads for in my postal mail box. Any one of them may provide better internet than DSL, but you’ll have to compare availability and cost.