In-flight Wi-Fi that doesn’t work, the spotty conference-centre connection, an off-the-grid Airbnb rental (which sounded ideal when you booked it): Accessing reliable, fast Wi-Fi while you’re travelling can feel like a real nightmare, especially when you have to take a Zoom call on the road, or when you’d rather stream a movie than be stuck watching whatever is available on demand in a hotel.
One simple solution is to use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, but that won’t work for everyone. So we’ve tested a few other options, to figure out which one makes the most sense for a variety of situations.
The most direct way to access the Internet on the road (but not on a plane) is to pick up your phone. Netflix and YouTube 1080p HD videos look smooth on a 5 Mbps (megabits per second) download stream, a rate that’s easily achieved on a 5G cellular signal.
You can also share your phone’s wireless connection with your laptop, tablet, or other non-cellular device via tethering. You can turn on hotspot mode on an Android phone or Apple iPhone, or use a USB cord to connect to compatible devices like a laptop. Note that there is a separate data cap in hotspot mode that ranges from 5 GB to 60 GB, depending on your data plan. After you reach that cap, browsing and streaming on your laptop or tablet will slow down.
If you need speed for downloading files or game updates, check your phone for the 5G+/UW/UC indicator. These higher-frequency versions of 5G cellular connections are significantly faster than 4G LTE or regular 5G. When we speed-tested 5G using a Verizon-connected iPhone 15 Pro Max, we used the Speedtest app to measure 27 Mbps download speeds on 5G without UW; that improved to 281 Mbps after the phone connected to a faster 5G UW signal.
A mobile hotspot is a small box you carry with you that can provide Internet via Wi-Fi, USB, or an Ethernet cable. It’s like a mobile phone, but for data only.
So why would you want to buy or rent a hotspot instead of just using your phone? A hotspot is handy when you're travelling overseas, since you can pay for one connection for the whole group, instead of buying individual international plans or extra SIM cards for each of your phones. A hotspot also makes sense on business trips: Keeping your work Internet and your personal streaming separate is good practice, especially if you can write the hotspot and data plan off as a business expense.
You can add mobile hotspot service to your phone bill, just like adding a new line to your service, or have it billed separately for business purposes. The data limit is baked into the plan you sign up for, so speeds will slow down after 2 GB to 100 GB of data is used. But this data doesn’t count towards your phone data limits.
When Wirecutter senior editor Caitlin McGarry recently travelled on an Amtrak train, she found the shared public Wi-Fi to be far too slow to get work done. But connecting her iPhone to T-Mobile’s 5G UC service and tethering her Mac laptop to a Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro mobile hotspot on AT&T’s 5G+ service instantly boosted her speeds: 222 Mbps on the former and 325 Mbps on the latter. The Amtrak Wi-Fi? A piddling 1.35 Mbps. That’s not enough speed for a video conference or streaming media, aside from maybe a podcast.
In a hotel room or a guest home, like an Airbnb, you’re likely to have access to a shared Wi-Fi service, which may be fine for your use. However, if you’d like effortless Internet access, you can use a travel router, which is a portable version of the router you have at home. Travel routers depend on an external source for Internet connectivity; you might use an Ethernet connection on the wall of your hotel room or plug it into a spare port on your Airbnb’s router.
The main benefit of a travel router is the easy setup: You can turn on your tablets, phones and laptops, and then instantly connect to the travel router, if it’s set with the same network name (SSID) and password as your home router. The drawback is that the travel router’s Wi-Fi signal is unlikely to reach the pool or a conference room on another floor if you leave the router in your room.
Another benefit to using a travel router is when you need to pay or sign up to connect each device to the Internet. With a travel router, you just have to pay or sign in once on the router or the router’s phone app, and you’ll be able to share the Internet connection with all of your family’s (or coworkers’) devices.
Packing a travel router will be a more attractive proposition if your hotel offers a faster premium Internet connection, or if you can plug into an Airbnb’s speedy Internet connection. That said, the signal to the Asus router was much more responsive than the hotel’s public Wi-Fi connection or when I used my phone’s 5G connection. A more-responsive connection is better for browsing selections in streaming services, web surfing and online gaming, particularly multiplayer. - The New York Times
Joel Santo Domingo
The author is a writer at Wirecutter covering home Wi-Fi networking and computer storage
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