🔴4GLTE Router Shootout - Roundup and Comparison

hey guys this is peter and this week i have something cool for you i have a shootout between three different 4g lte modems now a 4g lte modem is uh well it's a radio of sorts and you put a sim card into it from your telco provider and it allows you get the internet over it so it's pretty cool this is part of a whole series that i've been doing but today i'm going to take three different radios and compare them using the same location the same time period the same sim card the same antenna pointing at the same towers it from the exact same spot so we're really going to get a good comparison i'm also going to take a look at a couple features that a lot of you asked me to look for one of them is band locking and why would you want a band lock don't you just want the best signal out there not necessarily your best signal may not actually be your best carrier may not yield your fastest results so you may actually want to tune in to a particular band and lock it and say only pick up band four and it'll do that so here's the radios i'm going to look at today and what i really like about them is they represent way different price points this one is called mophie and it's a great one i like it because it covers all my t-mobile verizon at t it covers all the major bands we learned in earlier videos you got to match your bands you got to find out where your cell tower is and what band is putting out or you can just say this one works with this one actually covers all the t-mobile bands check my earlier videos i go over all the different bands of all the different providers different geographical locations from canada to the uk and what bands you you need the us is the craziest we have bands all over the place it is a large country after all but i'm going to take it this look at this one this one is the cadillac this is 299 bucks and has some great firmware with some great options so yes you can do all your time to live things you can do your band locking all of that a lot of people like this option but say oh it's a little bit expensive i wish there was something else we're going to take a look at some of those too this one is the kufi it actually has the same bands and it is much less expensive this one is 159 bucks i have that one here too so we're going to take a look at that one and i also have a different one this one is by ecom it also has external antennas you can access them from the back the back we're going to be doing all of that look at this price point it's 99 bucks and has a feature that none of the other ones have you can plug in a landline pick up the phone and talk on it pretty darn cool it uses the same phone number that's associated with your sim card so i also did learn a lot by talking to my t-mobile representative if you think you're just going to buy this and stick in it and you're not going to have any problems that's probably not realistic you're always going to have to call somebody and turn on some of these plans let me just go and talk about some of these plans and what i've learned the first one at first the guy told me goes just ignore the essentials one that's not for you and he's right it's not for me but maybe it's for you there's a lot of different reasons you may want to use one of these modems maybe you're a nomadic or you're a living off the grid so maybe you're living on boat maybe you have an rv maybe you like to camp maybe your tailgater these are all great examples of someone that would want to use one of these uh maybe you have a second house and you're like you know i don't use the internet that much i'm tired of paying 70 bucks a month some months i don't even go there this would be great in fact you could carry it with you so some people they can't get the a good good internet service provider down their street because it's a private street or they can't get it in their area but their phone works fine this would be excellent so a lot of people say i'm waiting for 5g not necessarily 5g and all you've heard about 5g is about huge speeds huge speeds are great if you're very close to the tower when you have a high carrier it dissipates take for example you're listening to music in your car and someone else drives and you can hear their music what do you hear you hear the bass because low frequencies penetrate stuff they go the distance high frequencies they disappear like mad same with all of these signals we're trying to get so anyway essentials 26 bucks i really like this one they did tell me if you live in a populated area like i do like san jose and it gets congested these ones go down first so if you were like hey i'm kind of on a fixed income i know how to use netflix i know how to pull things down when it's not prime time and save them on my drive and watch them later this would work great magenta this is a line you can actually get now i was talking about binge on and how i could stream things for free you can actually stream netflix with this they have a program called netflix on us you can contact them and find out more about it uh it seems to get the hd screens you want to step up to a little bit more but if you mostly watch netflix and that's 90 of your bandwidth which is true for a lot of people then this would be fantastic you could get like a six gigabyte plan added to your existing account and uh it would just be relatively inexpensive much cheaper than cable and now it's free to go wherever you want and you're not going to have any limitations if you if you have cable that you know some people said i have fiber to my rooftop why do i care you probably don't but a lot of people don't a lot of people don't have good access to decent internet or affordable internet and this is a much better deal um there's things these things can do these can travel with you all of these operate on 12 volts so you can take them with you take them into the woods what have you in now it doesn't work in the middle of yosemite valley where you're surrounded by granite but it will work in a lot of different places anywhere cell phone will so let's take a look at these see the kind of speeds we get and compare them against one or the other and again i'm going to be looking at some of the key features that they provide like the band locking and shoot and like the ttl function a lot of people are looking for they all work using this sim card here t-mobile gives you a little tiny sim card all of these use a carrier to make it a bigger form factor so it fits inside and now it's the same card to slightly bigger form factor and on these modems i call them modems there you plug them in all of these these ones are really easy it's a cabinet latch so click it's like a toaster down up down all right so i'm going to plug this one in and we're going to unplug this computer from the network and we're going to run some basic tests on it we're going to see uh take a quick look at the firmware see the different options that are available and basically just take a look at some of the speeds all right let's get to it all right so first up we're looking at the kufi and this one is a router it does receive all the different bands that i wanted to get the two the four the five the uh 12 i know that 66 is in there uh so this did cover all the different bands i could put it up on the screen again but uh what i wanted to see out of this one is well could it get the internet for me and it looks like it already has i'm looking down at the bottom of my screen it's connected so i've plugged in an external antenna that i use i'm going to use on all of them to make it fair and well using the same sim card so let's take a quick peek it is prime time people streaming so i may not get amazing speeds but hey it's going to be fair so here we are this is ookla and you can see t-mobile's here and it's chosen a server let's just click go and get this on all right so my ping is the latency to the servers and so that's going to be an important score i guess it's setting some stuff up 39 that's not horrible and that is 40 there are some decent speeds there so 44 i almost saw 50. that was 48 48. yeah come on all right now depending on the time of day this can be much much better this is pretty much the worst case scenario this is 8 o'clock pacific time hey and that is outstanding i'm getting over 20 megabit up now if you have up speed issues a lot of people are getting warnings when they're doing uh you know video chats and stuff it's because your up speeds garbage my cable for example i'll get 80 down and six up so this is plenty down and now what what do you need in order to stream well you need uh to 1080p you want about 12 and a half so this is going to be perfect in fact i could have two streams on this this would be no problem two streams and someone else surfing it would be perfect that is not a bad score that's your koofi and let's take a quick look at what kufi has to offer since we're on this one i think uh the i didn't log into it into the firmware 192.168. i think it's 1.1 is that right yes this is the kufi so all of them have different things so here i can see this is where my computer's plugged in i have it hardwired plugged in it also does put out wi-fi it puts out 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi this uh so here's my signal you can see my signal you can see it's t-mobile as my provider you can see my well i'm going to blur it out but that's my imei number now i can go ahead and look at my network options and there's 3g and 4g and okay so gobi net it's obviously working well right out of the box these are good set all right just a quick summary this is a good modem it has a lot of different bands and offers a really good price point but i didn't see the key features people are looking for with the time to live and the channel locking let's move on let's go to the next one let's go ahead and set it up and i think i want to do this one next let's do the mophie this is the most expensive one this is 299 dollars but this is the cadillac it does have all the cool features i'm going to just plug it in real quick let's get to it here's the next one this is the mophie 4500 this is a special edition that is the uh att t-mobile and verizon i've got my sim card in there let's see it's booting up i'll have the network soon this one has some really cool features in it you're going to see the firmware on this it just lights up and there are so many different options a lot of people were afraid hey which version do you have do you have a sim 7 or a sim 4 or whatever because they wanted to make sure that the options were there i did find all the options i was looking for uh this one has a cool one as well you can of course fail over which means you can plug in internet to the blue port and in the event that that went down you would switch over automatically so perfect on a kiosk or something like that if you have a pop-up store maybe it's a running event or something like that you want to slide credit cards one of these devices would be invaluable because you could actually bring the internet with you so am i up awesome i see a light is on i had to reboot it a second time why i forgot to move over the sim card the sim card is your account it is your network it's like a phone you got to have the phone account a lot of people seem a little confused they're like wait so i get a blank sim card and i don't have to pay any bills no you pay a bill for this so that's why it's really important to pick your plan it's all plugged in and you go to ucla and remind ourselves what we got last time we got a ping of 30 39 using the same antenna we got 47 and a half and 26 so i'm going to write those down all right i'm just going to hit go 47.526 so this one is going to go ahead and get us a ping it's the same time of day a lot of people watching netflix 31 is not bad that's not bad 40. i forgot what we had before seems about the same so it's using the same antennas it's pulling the same channel most likely now i'm going to show you how there's more tools in here come on get up to 20. there we go that is nice so i wouldn't get lost in the minutia because this is basically the same scores that i'm getting but what you're really paying for here is a the support they give you a 1 800 number and i have called them they are a good team they had a lot of good ideas for me so um let's hear they're up in canada so a lot of people are like what do i do if i live in canada well a i'd call the canadians with the best modem so uh let's go ahead and uh let's see this i went ahead and looked at the firmware let's type in this former 192.168. and there's a slightly different they go do a 10.1 there they called this lucy and i'm going to go ahead and just log in show you it a lot of people were saying i can't find these particular settings guess what they have two different views of this there's basic and advanced so the one you may be looking for is maybe an advanced now a lot of things i was expecting to find in advance are actually in basic in fact i think they're mislabeled there's actually more more features in basic than there are in advance which just doesn't make any sense but hey they're canadian who knows anyway uh go here to mophie and turtlemotum i actually love canadians they're great uh let's see but we have to tease each other right so here we go you can check your signal strength that is nice uh here's the band lock a lot of we were talking about band lock uh i'm pulling lte band 2 right now which is kind of interesting because i was getting better speeds on band 4. you can actually do a band scan it'll show you all the different i'm just going to do it what it's going to do is scan all the different bands that are available in the air right now and show me the carrier that is attached to them so a carrier wave is you know it's got ups and downs and stuff it has a frequency attached to it the higher the frequency the more data that can go on there the lower the frequency the longer it's going to go so they both have their place if you're on the sticks you might be like i'm i'm kind of looking at that uh that lower one i just need a constant connection i need a good connection it doesn't have to be the fastest thing on the planet again 5g a lot of people are saying i'm going to wait for 5g because i live out in the middle of nowhere 5g is going to get you it'll get you coverage it's not going to get you high speed it really isn't the high speed needs to be on the high frequency carrier which just like someone else's stereo the high frequencies don't make it to you it's the low frequency so they're going to make it to you i don't know if you used to be popular someone else in traffic would have their boom box going that's all you could hear and he thought are they really listening to boom boom boom no they're listening to the full range but the boom boom is the only thing that leaks outside their car that's because low frequencies penetrate here you can see all the different frequencies that are being that are in the area and as you can see some of them are high frequency carriers and some of them are low frequencies here we go so bandwidth 2 15 up 15 down all right that's going to be a good mixture of the two i think right now i just grabbed band 4 which is 20 up and 20 down what did i say i grabbed i'll have to look at that again band 5 actually belongs to a different carrier so don't care 12 well that's going to go a long distance notice how clear that signal is if you were just saying give me the best signal you might actually get the 90 because it's your clearest oh no there's an 81 in there it belongs to somebody else that would be horrible too you are for your fastest speeds i'd be looking at 66 oh 71. five and five uh 66 because it has 20 megahertz up and 20 megahertz down i'm getting a decent signal you want something ideally under 80. so there's the decibel gain right this is signal negative 99. under 100 is good uh under 105 is okay but under 80s amazing so you may want to play with different antenna solutions or move your rv around until you get the best uh signal that you can but here's where i focus my attention on four and on 66. is that fair yeah that's fair what did we have on the band block i'm not band locked right now i have it set to auto but it's pulling in two which as we just saw may not be my best solution i could force it to band four should we do that do we have time i have the time let's check it out let's see we're clicking finish oh it's going to reboot so i'll cut this part out all right you can see it set itself to b4 or band 4 and now it's rebooting the router i'll go back to waiting silently all right well it's back up i'm logging back in to see i'm now on band 4 so let's see what we do mophie internal modem not only do i have a lot of stuff on the side but there's nested stuff in here you saw that just opened up and now i can see all the bands so band scanner band lock we're on band lock yes i am locked i'm locked to band 4 and yes it is indeed loft so let's go and check let's remind ourselves the scores we had before 31 42 24. oh 24 42 they flip let's go ahead and hit it see if we get a better ping 31 might not be tough to beat let's take a look 39 now we're looking for 42 yeah it's right in the same ballpark and 24. now this is a time of day thing too so maybe you know and if it's signal and all of that yeah i'm kind of like in band 2 right now as we're talking i'm liking band 2 just as much so at least at this time of day so you may want to consider that because we're always going to take a look at that stuff now i don't know if i showed you this but let's go ahead and take a look at this firmware real quick i do want to show you i'm in basic mode i can go to where was that internal modem settings down here everyone was saying oh there's no ttl settings here it is time to live you can go ahead and change that you can change it down or up and basically but this is a latency with the system that allows you to get certain timings there are of course i would normally set it to uh let it pick itself but sometimes you need to force it in order to get certain options uh that's just the way it goes so there you go guys that's pretty cool um let's go test the next one next one the next one is going to be the ecom this is the least expensive one this is only 99 bucks but i did like the fact that it like the fact that it stands up that's kind of nice i like the fact that it has external antenna capabilities because i'm going to plug an external antenna into it i will put a link to the antenna i've been using i really like it it has a it's a little disc it's like a puck it looks like a um a hockey puck and it has two different wires which is nice because you get the diversity antennas you have a primary and you do have an auxiliary and being able to plug those in gives it a reference and it's really able to get a good signal this was about 49 bucks and i'll put a link to it because i've been thrilled with it it is both magnetic and sticky depending on your installation i use i put up some washers i screwed them into the house stuck it up there with a magnet it worked great so let's go um give this a shot oh really quick let me show you what i'm doing each time i'm actually taking the sim card out of one modem and placing it into the next one now on this modem we have a little door here that's where your sim card goes we also have another door right here and that's where your antennas go whoa i just hit the microphone that is a no-no but i will try to squelch that out but yeah that's where your antennas go that's where your sim card goes your sim card goes up which makes it challenging or actually it goes down it makes it challenging to put in this carrier because it keeps wanting to slip out there we go no that's looking better right all right that slides in move it back and forth we're good to go all right so now we have the ecom this is called the p21 i don't see that listed in here but uh there it is first line this is the p21 and i love the price point on this it also has a feature where you can plug in a landline phone that would be kind of cool you can imagine be houseboating and you just put this out on the deck not only would you have internet for the kids which should be fantastic but you'd have a landline so you can actually dial out etc kind of cool um that worked pretty well someone asked me about the call quality i need to play with that with some more it looks like it's up and going and has signal and i'm up and ready so let's just do a quick test on this uh i didn't do any settings yet i haven't locked bands or anything like it does have that option by the way kind of cool so let's be reminded of what we had 39 46 20 i think we before we had 42 24. so this is all in the same vein kind of thing let's take a quick look see what we're getting now 32 that's not a bad ping but again it can be the variability it's like you know casting a die uh 32 is not the same as 42 but you know that is not a bad score and because this is one-third the cost uh you might be saying hey that's reasonable and that is not a bad up score and it could be that we're on a different band we've done a different channel whatever or it could just be a time of day thing you know uh netflix is uh is pretty awesome and that's all more than enough you need all you need is 12 and a half down to watch 1080p to watch 720p you even need less so this is going to be a wonderful experience if you had this for your uh maybe you have a beach house or something like that and you're going up for the weekend bring this with you then you'll be able to watch netflix if you have one of these plans like the magenta it comes with now they have netflix on us and i was trying to ask the guy about it he said some of the plans they actually pay for netflix for you too and that sounds kind of cool so a lot of these have different options but there are plans out there that will allow you to stream for free with one of the most desirable i'd say the most desirable at least right now streaming service well there you have it three different 4g lte routers and different price points and different capabilities with different feature sets so this mopi 4500 is obviously the the cadillac it has all the great features it has the ability to do the the time to live if you need time to live there you go if you want band locking you've got that as well great it has all the different channels that i need for verizon for att and for t-mobile so that's fantastic let's take a look at this one this one is has all the different bands that i need so perfect on the road solution is a well it's half the price it's 159 bucks does have all the different bands but it doesn't have some of the cool features like the band locking at least i didn't find it and it didn't have the cool features like the time to live but uh otherwise a very solid product this one at 99 bucks it's hard to beat it it does have a limited support of the number of channels but if it does fit your needs this is a steal it does have some really cool let me see here's the different bands two three four five seven eight and twenty eight so if that's going to fit your needs for where you need it to be this one has some cool features i really like this one uh i think i've had a great time with it it has some really good support for channel two and channel four those were huge for my but not my work and my home and this one does work rather neat it does have the uh the band locking so if you do have a band that you want to grab onto this is neat but of course there's your number one i'll put links to all three of these in the description below it will help me if you take a look also put the antenna that i think is really really cool it is small it's a hockey puck if you have an uh mobile solution you are mobile you can slap attach it to the top of your camper whatever and it'll either stick with an adhesive or you can use it as a magnet put it in the window it's been great anyway guys there you go uh and uh you know take a look at your call your provider get someone on the line and talk to them about these different solutions there are some streaming solutions that allow you to watch netflix can't really beat that and uh remember with netflix you can always download movies to watch them offline so uh if i was on a camping trip or if i was using essentials absolutely i would do that and watch it offline as anyways guys thanks for watching give this thumbs up it definitely helps out my channel helps the video float to the top so if you like these kind of things please give it to your friends send them a link always helps thanks guys see you the next one

Channel: Peter Carcione

Views: 88,474

Keywords: MoFi, Mofi 4500, Kuwfi, 4GLTE, 4GLTE hotspot, hotspot, tmobile, t-mobile, t-mobile hotspot, verizon, at&t hotspot, 4GLTE Router, Cancel Internet, Cancel Comcast, Cancel cable, 4G VoLTE, VoLte

Id: gaxjuYGI878

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020