<p>I am so not a techie…so this might be a stupid question.</p>
<p>My son is moving in to a new apartment on a tight budget. His rent includes utilities, but not internet or cable. His job will entail a good amount of travel. Not much of a TV watcher other than sports and GoT.</p>
<p>He is thinking of not getting cable/internet for his apartment, but instead going the route of getting a wifi hotspot device along with a Netflix subscription.</p>
<p>He also was wondering if he could stream HBO or ESPN through his parental units’ DirectTV subscription.</p>
<p>Comments? I know nothing about if this is a workable plan.</p>
<p>The problem is that if he’s going to use it a lot, he’ll run into a data cap. Check the deal closely. It may say unlimited but that usually means an actual limit of 5 gigs at the most and may involve lower data speeds above some number.</p>
<p>The hot spots can be great but they don’t last that long on battery power. I assume this would be plugged in. You can get some for “free plus contract”, which is probably more expensive than paying for the thing with no contract.</p>
<p>Well…yes…my son has an iPhone. But he needs Internet access on his computer too. He found that getting that for his computer in his house was cheaper than a wifi hotspot thing.</p>
<p>Makes it easier to watch Netflix movies! Not fun to do on a phone!</p>
<p>No, what I am talking about is a phone actually being a WiFi hotspot for other devices. Many providers offer that service at widely different fees. I don’t know about iPhones (I am an Android person), but I do know that a bunch of Android phones can serve as an actual WiFi hotspot for you computer and other gadgets.</p>
<p>AT&T Offers Wireless Hotspot service on iPhones but you have to get the 5 GB plan. My iPhone costs $55/month for 3 GB. It would be $75 for a 5 GB plan and $45 for a 300 MB plan. I use a little over 300 MB a month and I had the 5 GB plan because I wanted the hotspot option for working remotely for this past spring but I dropped it because I don’t need it anymore. At least not for a while. I can use the hotspot for about six hours when it’s not plugged in.</p>
<p>If he wants the hotspot through his phone, then it’s relatively expensive if you go with AT&T or Verizon because you have to take their upper-tier plans.</p>
<p>I also have a Verizon JetPack which I used in previous years. It cost me $45/month for 5 GB of data. Battery life was 2-3 hours on 4G, longer on 3G. This is the 2-year contract price. The device itself is either $200 or $300 (I don’t remember). If you’re trying to save money, then this may not be a particularly good way to do it - especially if you already have a phone that could be used as a hotspot. I didn’t want to carry an extra device with me and it costs more for service having a phone + data and a data-only device than just having a phone + data (with a higher cap) and you have to pay for the device through your contract rate.</p>
<p>(minor note: the above rates are with our corporate discounts)</p>
<p>I like having the Jetpack for backup in areas with weak signals. We’re planning a trip in a somewhat remote area and I’ll turn on the Verizon Jetpack and the AT&T Hotspot so that we’ll have two hotspots available for working remotely.</p>
<p>DD found the same situation as others. She used the iphone hot spot to connect her computer for a couple of months but was always running into the data cap. Ordering a higher data limit was more expensive than getting an internet connection and wireless modem through the cable company and it worked better and faster in her aprtment than the hot spot. You do not have to get a cable TV plan to get the internet connection. </p>
<p>BTW - she was always trying to find free hotspots when she was out to keep under the cap so would end up at Starbucks or similar places instead of her apartment. She was much happier with internet in the apartment.</p>
<p>ComCast has a free WiFi program with over 100,000 hotspots. You can go to their website to get a map of hotspots in their area. If you have them as your ISP, you can log into these hotspots with your ComCast credentials and use their hotspots.</p>
<p>ComCast is planning to greatly expand this program by providing the service from their residential customers. Customers that get new service and rent their modems will get a new kind of modem which has service for the residential customer and which will also provide guest WiFi service for other ComCast customers. It is not supposed to affect the residential customers bandwidth allocation and it is supposed to be walled off from the customer’s network. This has the potential to decrease the data needs of ComCast customers on their phone plans.</p>
<p>ISP service and mobile data plans are very profitable areas for comm companies. Competition moving in could greatly reduce prices.</p>
<p>Right now my kids use my Netflix account (even the one who lives in another city). So if you already have one… at least for instant watching he could use yours. However, I heard recently that Netflix is going to crack down on that. Hasn’t happened so far, though.</p>
<p>I think that Netflix has to provide some kind of balance. If they crack down on customers too hard, they can lose customers. Perhaps one or two kids would be okay but 10 friends wouldn’t be.</p>
<p>I looked up the price of the current Verizon Jetpack for prepaid (no subsidy) and it’s $99 so it appears that the newer devices are a lot cheaper than the old devices.</p>
<p>In our area, sprint can provide unlimited hotspot for $35/mo, but when I tested it, the link on the Iphone is too weak to run data from my house.</p>
<p>ATT over here offer ADSL(not U-verse) for $15/mo, it is lot cheaper than hotspot.</p>
<p>A Comcast credential is at least $20/mo and I am not sure their hotspots will reach the location you wanted.</p>
<p>Oh, I didn’t say they shouldn’t crack down. Just that they haven’t yet… we are not big watchers at either location. But it is a little tricky; it seems to me that my kid upstairs at my home address should be able to watch on her laptop while I am downstairs in the living room watching on the TV. And I want to be able to watch it while I am away from home in a place like an airport or a hotel room on my laptop. But I can see why the kid living at another address in another city shouldn’t be able to. Seems difficult technically to achieve this, though. Not meaning to derail the thread, back to the hotspot question.</p>
<p>Have you considered Clear Internet? The $50/month hotspot plan is unlimited and the life on the apparatus is about 5-6 hours, I believe it’s been even longer but don’t quote me on that one. She never has a problem plugging it up into a wall socket if necessary. We are on the road quite a bit and its great for dd to use it while we are in the car/on the train/at an airport waiting for a flight. The disk is small and lightweight and less cumbersome than the Verizon hotspot.</p>
<p>I use Clear internet at home, but grandfathered into one of their slower (& cheaper $25 a mo) plans. Haven’t wanted to get a Clear hotspot because I don’t want to remind them I am still using this plan!</p>
<p>Ive used a Verizon mifi, but it is easier to use my iphone for a hot spot as one less piece of electronica to keep track of ( & I have unlimited data- its $ 30 extra for use as a hotspot)</p>
<p>My iphone5 is significantly faster than my iphone 4 but to retain the unlimited data with Verizon, I needed to purchase the iphone outright from Apple.
But so happy I don’t need to use Comcast.</p>
<p>My kids who also have smartphones have data capped at 2gb for $30 month. Not enough to use for streaming anything but a few youtube videos and music downloads. They dont go over though because they have wireless elsewhere.</p>
<p>Its weird that more domestic airports dont have free internet, they do internationally.
Amtrak has free internet as well ( on the trains, not in the station).</p>
<p>Walmart offers Internet to Go which is a pay as you go hotspot. You check to see if it works in your area, buy the device for a little under $100 and then buy your data separately. The best thing about it is that your data does not expire and no monthly fees. Reviews on the website should tell you the pros and cons. I have one and find it works well in some areas, not so if you are really remote.</p>
<p>So it seems that the biggest problem for my son would be the data caps?</p>
<p>According to him, the reason he wants to go this route is that supposedly the (old) building he is moving in to is known for tenants having problems with their wireless, and the service used by the building (MDU? never heard of it) is supposed to be awful. He was thinking that having his own hotspot would let him avoid these problems, and that he could just plug his laptop in to his tv to watch whatever he streams.</p>
<p>We have a Verizon family plan with “share everything.” He has said he would get his own account so as to not compromise the rest of the family’s ability to download. He would prefer to stay with Verizon but would not be adverse to changing carriers for a better deal.</p>
<p>Our S travels 3 weeks every month. He researched and requested we buy iPhones and Sprint because it has unlimited data. We have done so and are pretty happy. They do have a limit if you are “roaming” for talk or data, but so far we have never encountered any roaming, even while driving thru Amish country and Gettysburg. </p>
<p>There is an extra charge for tethering. We haven’t explored it so far.</p>