VZ MVNO with hotspot support?

[robbyrobby]

seems this thread has swerved to a Visible discussion and needs to get back on track

but i can say i have never used Visible myself and have witnessed many frustrated users on online forums. that said i do know a few people who use Visible and all really like the combination a value and service, in particular even if its not super fast or consistent they are very much impressed with unlimited hotspot. i can't think of anyone who switched to Visible and has left for something else unless the decision was related to a handset deal or handset compatibility issue of some sort.

my personal reason for never having tried is also related to handset compatibility, i tend to switch around phones a lot and don't have(or run into deal to acquire) as many that work on Verizon as T-Mobile, AT&T. if i was Verizon network user(for more than my $10/month Mob line used near exclusive for talk and text only) i would very likely be a Visible customer. Also the fact that i have had for several years an. at&t iPad unlimited SIM that takes care of any and all hotspot needs i have.

[sporkman1]

Aside from all of this talk about deprioritization - it only affects people on congested towers. So if you're with Visible or any other Verizon Prepaid or MVNO - and if there's just one level of deprioritzation - and if you're usually within range of a non-congested tower, you're probably not going to notice anything. This is going to be true for any cellular provider. I can affirm this. I do know that there is a congested Verizon tower around here and when I connect to it on Visible the speeds are horrible. But in another part of the area on another tower - I can only assume that that tower is not congested - because the Visible speeds are great from that tower.

I have some background in wifi deployment in the WISP space and while I'm sure LTE and other cell-centric technologies are much more complex, a lesson learned in the WISP world is that throttling people can have all sorts of unintended consequences. The goal in most wireless engineering where only one station is allowed to "speak" at a time and the base can only speak to one client at a time (think the old days of ethernet before switching was a thing), and I have to assume cellular is no different in this regard, is to have each client "speak" for as short a time as possible, which allows one to maximize throughput on a single base radio. As you can imagine, if you are throttling somewhere away from the radio pair, you're basically just minimizing throughput for everyone, as your throttled clients hog more airtime.

I would love to one day find out how "throttling" happens in the MVNO case, because the simple/obvious ways of doing this are awful.

[SoNic67]

Total Wireless has 10GB hotspot, full speed.

[jameny5]

Hi,

Looking for backup internet for my fios connection. My dsl is going away (copper retirement) and cable is really poor here, esp if power is out.

Does a plan exist that’s solely usage based?

Really prefer VZ MVNO - TMO and ATT are spotty here.

A hotspot that has wired Ethernet and bridge mode is a huge plus (running pfsense firewall for failover).

Verizon Prepaid has hotspot on their $50 dollar 7GB plan. You can turn it on but, once you use it up - you have to buy more. On their unlimited plan - you can add hotspot service for $5 bucks more. 18 GB cap on the hotspot. I know people want to be on hotspot all day. It's just not worth it. It will eat up all your data faster than you think. Turn it off and use your home wifi. I only turn the hotspot on my tablet at work to watch a movie, a little YouTube and some Pluto TV when I have downtime. Who doesn't?

[ohenryx]

Going back 6 or 7 years, I was working from home quite a bit, and really really needed internet to work. I paid for a Comcast cable connection and AT&T Uverse. Total cost for both, with all fees, was only about $90 per month. And as this was for full time, well paid work, I didn't give it a second thought. I quit AT&T when they doubled the price on me, and Comcast had no down time (that I was aware of) over the previous 12 months. These days, I'm back with AT&T (switched back a little over 2 years ago when they offered 1 gig fiber). Knock on wood, there have only been 2 short outages (that I was aware of) over the last 2 years plus.

And as I am now retired, I can better withstand short outages.