Best wifi locators

Wendy's: 0. Panera Bread: 1Mbps Panera Bread has dependably stable Wi-Fi at around 1Mbps down, but you may get bumped off the network after 30 minutes during the sandwich shop's busier hours. Dunkin' Donuts: 1. Target: 1. KFC: 1. Tim Hortons: 1. Lowe's Home Improvement: 1. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf: 2. Burger King: 3. Best Buy: 3. McDonald's: 4. Subway: 4. Arby's: Taco Bell: Starbucks: More Galleries Toyota debuts halo Capstone trim for Tundra pickup.

Nintendo Switch: The best games to play right now. The 17 products that Apple's iPhone laid to rest. More Galleries best new TV shows to watch, stream, obsess about 65 Photos. The wireless industry has mostly opted to hype millimeter-wave 5G despite the immense obstacles to deploying it at scale. Enticed buyers then end up discovering that their new 5G phones ride on low-band 5G. This low-band 5G is barely faster than 4G—or even slower—and it may put a dent in battery life , owing to the compromises made to cram 5G reception into smartphones.

The federal government has been working to find and free up mid-band spectrum to complement the existing airwaves , and carriers have spent tens of billions of dollars to claim their share. A year from now, 5G may work much better than it does today—but you may have to buy new hardware to enjoy it on these new frequencies. And at that point, buying a 5G device from any of the big three, not just T-Mobile, may offer much more of a network-performance reward.

Network: Reliability is the reason to buy a hotspot, starting with the network behind it. We assessed 5G on the same scale: Gigabit speeds confined to a block or just a street corner help much less than Mbps connections available across a neighborhood. 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.

Wi-Fi flexibility: In addition to support for both 2. 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 pandemic quashed that this time, but we did test this set of hotspots in urban and suburban spots in and around Washington, DC.

Measurements with the Speedtest site and app informed our decision, but we focused mostly on network reliability and coverage, with the battery life and usability of each hotspot as secondary considerations. The Verizon Inseego Jetpack MiFi L is the best hotspot for most people because of its exceptional coverage, fast performance, and good battery life. More than once, we saw this hotspot manage download speeds faster than those of a Verizon 5G hotspot in the same location.

That strength was key to our recommending Verizon as the best wireless carrier for most people. In our tests, the L connected with boring reliability.

Download speeds during our test period for this update, from December to March , peaked at Mbps along Pennsylvania Avenue in southeast DC but averaged Mbps over that time. Uploads averaged 23 Mbps. The L can connect up to 15 devices via Wi-Fi 5 That older protocol loses a bit of performance and reliability in comparison with the current Wi-Fi 6, assuming you have devices that also support Wi-Fi 6—but we doubt that makes a huge difference in practice.

All figures assume paperless billing and automatic payments. If you already have a phone on a Verizon postpaid, no-contract Unlimited Start, Play More, Do More, or Get More plan , you can add a hotspot to your plan—with a separate allocation of data, so you can do this even with the no-hotspot-included Start Unlimited—for a much smaller premium.

Note that exceeding those caps through the hotspot leaves you throttled back to a useless kbps data speed. The my. When it comes to speed, the more important thing here is what T-Mobile is doing with the frequencies that came with its purchase of Sprint. During our test period, that portion of the network often delivered speeds above Mbps, maxing out at Mbps in a park in Arlington, Virginia. Otherwise, the M offers a pleasant experience. All of our test devices connected to its primary network on the first try and stayed connected.

The M 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.

The M offers a guest network disabled by default, with a weird wrinkle: Activating the guest Wi-Fi requires taking one of the two Wi-Fi bands the lower-performance but longer-range 2.

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