MoFi 5500 First Look - HUGE Upgrade from the 4500: WiFi 5, Gigibit Ethernet & Modem Options

six years after the small cellular integrated mofi 4500 came to market mofi is bringing out the bigger more powerful mofi 5500 hi i'm chris at the mobile internet resource center here to give you a first look at a new product line this is the mofi 5500 from mofi networks a cellular integrated router that combines wi-fi and cellular and in this case potentially dual cellular modems into a one um one unit designed for installing in into vehicles um now a little bit of history about six years ago the mofi 4500 came to market it caused a little bit of a stir because this tiny little thing a cellular integrated router was just 299 dollars and it was the first a low-cost category 6 cellular integrator router we saw and it had some significant issues but it also developed some fans particularly because of that value pricing you know 299 dollars for a router that was had wi-fi and a cellular integrated modem that was category six you know not just super low end but the big issues that this had even six years ago was that the ethernet ports were just fast ethernet not gigabit so just limited to 100 megabits per second and the wi-fi was just 2.4 gigahertz 802.11n so it was you know what was now called wi-fi for it was very limited on the wi-fi front and on the ethernet front so it wasn't a really great router for your local network even though it had a relatively decent uh cellular modem inside of it for six years ago in at least well now here we are in 2021 and after years of promising there's a next generation mofi coming well it is here the mofi 5500 is now available for pre-order and uh we'll be shipping um depending on the version in either may or june july so what what's what's new about the mo 5500 well the obvious thing is it is physically huge it is a gigantic router compared to this tiny little one which is going to be a major concern for anybody who wants to try and fit this into a tech cabinet in an rv or a boat so the physical size is i think a major step back but they're putting more into it so first off on the ethernet front still has four local area network ports and then a wide area network port but these are now gigabit ethernet ports so 10 times faster ethernet much better for your local network and speaking of your local network the wi-fi which is all of these antennas across the top and mofi tells us they're going to be the final shipping version will be shorter um but still four antennas across the top that's four by four memo dual band 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz wi-fi 802.11 ac so um the wi-fi five standard that is should give you really really fast local area wi-fi networking end the mofi has some support for using wi-fi as wan and connecting to upstream networks as well but that's never been one of the core features so a lot a lot of improvement on the wi-fi front a lot of improvement on your local networking front there still is a usb port for tethering and uh mofi has had that in the past they were actually the first router we ever saw that supported tethering to iphones which is a pretty tricky feature to do androids a lot of hot spots and stuff so it's got a usb tethering port and now the the big changes in the new generation are mostly around cellular so they've now got several different product line options they are starting with um just for 299 um wi-fi only no cellular so if you don't need cellular for some reason you can get a wi-fi only mofi for 2.99 for 3.99 you can get a cat 7 cellular modem so cat 7 is something we have not actually seen before on other products it's like cat6 it's kind of a middle tier cellular modem it's got a dual carrier aggregation so it can combine two bands for better speed and performance i'm giving you max theoretical speed of 300 megabits down but cat 7 allows for carry aggregation on uploads too if the tower supports it so you can have theoretical uploads of 100 megabits per second and better upload performance but what makes cat 7 in most interesting is that it actually supports a wider range of bands the particular modem chip than some of the we've never seen uh for example a cat 6 modem out that supports t-mobile's band 71 the cat 7 modem in here supports band 71 it supports 18t's first net on band 14 and supports pretty much most of the mainstream bands that you'd like um that the us carriers are using for 4g um they also have a version for you know jumping up they've got for 549 you can get dual cat 7 modems and that's actually what this version is so you've got dual memo antennas on one side for one modem on the other side for the other and you've got a dual modem device for under 550 dollars if assuming mofi does good job with the software to let you balance across that which we'll not 100 sure they'll be able to deliver that but you'll be able to put two modems to use simultaneously or fail over between them uh very very quickly so dual modem at a good price and that's also available for pre-order now and then coming out over the summer they have a cat 20 version which uses a single modem with four antennas so 4x4 memo um so basically cat 20 is about as high as 4g lte goes it's a very very capable modem capable of raw capable of multi gigabit speeds theoretical max theoretical speed of two gigabits per second connects to basically every band that exists in the world that is being used for 4g lte so a very very capable 4g device or if you want a 5g version you can get cat 20 plus 5g for 649 and that a 5g cellular integrated router for 650 dollars with a wide range of 5g bands so we're starting to see this kind of like evolution of routers to be able to support 5g new advances in hardware our concerns with mofis have always been well now it's the physical size but it's also always been the software the mofis have been hard to manage and configure a lot of people have uh struggled with them in the past we're going to be taking a closer look and sharing with our members just have they evolved the software have they made the mofi easier to manage um certainly they've always built fairly quality hardware it's just well now they're building big hardware so that's kind of a first look at a brand new product line to the market the mofi 5500 a literal big step from the mofi 4500 these videos are brought to you by our premium members from mobile internet aficionados they make it possible for us to track this news and create these videos if you like this video please give it a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe to our channel or better yet consider becoming a member yourself

Channel: Mobile Internet Resource Center

Views: 26,402

Rating: 4.9420891 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 57yLbSu7kRU

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021