- #Att wireless internet hotspot portable#
- #Att wireless internet hotspot software#
- #Att wireless internet hotspot download#
I tried both to make sure they were both usable, but typically I favored the speedier 5Ghz network. The Nighthawk provides two Wi-Fi networks, a 5Ghz band and a 2.4Ghz band. In a few dead spots around down near MoPac in West Austin, speeds slowed to less than 3 Mbps for downloads and uploads, but I only ran into those lower speeds a few times and only once or twice did the speeds drop so low it made the Internet unusable.
#Att wireless internet hotspot download#
The verdict: with a few small hitches, it performed as expected, with download speeds typically ranging from 15 Mbps to just topping 40 Mbps and upload speeds ranging anywhere from about 10 Mbps to about 30 Mbps. It wasn’t scientific: I limited my testing to daytime and didn’t keep returning to the same spots, but I transferred large files to services such as Dropbox, used and Netflix’s to get a general idea of how the Nighthawk performs in different parts of Austin. I drove it up and down IH-35, across 183, and into neighborhoods, stopping every so often to do speed tests on a phone, tablet and laptop multiple times. I took the Nighthawk with me walking and driving all over Austin, from the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail to northwest MoPac to deepest downtown. If you carry this thing with you a lot and you roam a lot all over town, you might find wildly inconsistent performance, particularly if you aren’t using it in areas with dense LTE service.
#Att wireless internet hotspot portable#
Which is a shame because the Nighthawk is a very good Wi-Fi device, versatile and easy to carry around, and perfectly capable of giving most people what they want in a portable hotspot without the added hype and expectations of “5G Evolution.”īut that’s with one very big caveat: like any hotspot, it’s subject to the variables of wireless life. If you charged admission for people to attend an advance screening of “The Last Jedi” but showed the audience a slightly enhanced version of 2015’s “The Force Awakens” with the title scratched out and replaced with “The Last Jedi (Evolution),” you’d have some very upset “Star Wars” fans. You might get mad and throw this thing across the room it certainly is shaped in a way that invites doing that.ĪT&T’s perhaps-too-aggressive marketing - putting the phrase “5G” anywhere near this thing - feels like a mistake. You’re going to have unrealistic expectations. 5G is a standard that’s still being worked on, and if you begin to believe that buying a Nighthawk means you’ll be accessing a next-generation 5G network that will give you a jump in speed comparable to when 3G networks gave way to 4G, you’re going to be very disappointed.
#Att wireless internet hotspot software#
Got all that? AT&T is using a variety of hardware and software techniques to squeeze more bandwidth out of its existing 4G LTE network and calling that “5G Evolution.”īut it’s not actually 5G. This denser, more advanced network enables the current evolution toward 5G. Small Cells are engineered to operate with the macro network to add coverage and capacity wherever it is needed Small cells inherently have Self Organizing Network (SON) capabilities built into the software which allow them to automatically adjust to their surroundings.” And that’s where things get interesting with the Nighthawk, especially if you live in Austin.Īustin is one of two cities (the other is Indianapolis) where AT&T is rolling out what it calls “5G Evolution,” a way to double LTE speeds by making the network denser with what it calls “Small cells” and by using software that adjusts to its surroundings.įrom AT&T: “. we continue to invest in upgrading our wireless network by adding small cells and using advanced technologies like carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO, 256 QAM and layering on LTE-LAA capabilities. To do this, the Nighthawk uses AT&T’s 4G LTE network, accessing those streams of Internet to share with its connected clients. You carry it around with you and it creates a Wi-Fi zone that your multiple phones, tablets, laptops and other devices can connect to wirelessly. Despite its grippy outer surface and aspirational name, it’s basically the same kind of square-puck Wi-Fi travel buddy that many people have been using for years. I tried to keep that in mind as I played around with AT&T’s latest mobile hotspot device, the Nighthawk Mobile LTE Hotspot.