Verizon MiFi Review

Disgusted with Comcast and faced with the prospect of being in remote areas and places that don't have internet access, my girlfriend and I got a MiFi.

We've had it for several months and used it quite a bit. Here's the lowdown:

You can have up to 5 computers use this as an access point. I believe you are allowed something like 8 gigs of downloading, which isn't nearly enough. The salesperson told us he could download 5 full-length movies in HD with no problem, which obviously was a lie. Verizon sales associates may know cool tricks and apps for their phones, but I haven't seen a lot of IT knowledge displayed by that crowd. Long story short: We downloaded .pdfs and maybe a few other things and went over the allotment to the tune of several hundred dollars.

It's slow. We regularly have 2 laptops using it, and often cannot have one person doing something such as streaming music without the other seeing a loss in speed. I never did a download/upload test, but it's about half as fast as my home connection, which by many measures is slow as well.

The battery lasts about 3 hours, so it must be charged regularly. We usually just leave it plugged in when using it near a plug, but one of the great features, that despite the shortcomings make this a great product nonetheless, is that it can be used anywhere you can get a signal. Verizon has a great network and is one of the reasons I've been a customer for so long, so only in the true outback of Alabama can I not receive a signal. This sole aspect made it a winner when I was traveling back and forth to Montgomery and my PhD student girlfriend and myself, a student at the time, needing access to lots of information at all times. Graduate school is a lot of work at all hours, and we've both passed the point of feeling something is amiss if we're off the grid, I'm sad to admit. I have a BlackBerry Tour 9630, which solves a lot of problems, but it has its limitations of course.

The MiFi is about the size of a thick credit card, so it fits easily in a pocket. The Verizon MiFi also can slide or fall right out of a pocket, and is made from a slick plastic material, so be careful. These are expensive items, although we found it for $50, with a contract of course. I think if one were to buy it outright with no hooks or contracts it's around $500. It would be nice if mobile phone co's could rely on their outstanding service and low costs to keep their customers instead of legally binding them for up to two years.

Overall, if you need the internet at all times or even just rely on it heavily for light work such as searches and general surfing it's a great product. If you need it for downloading files, streaming, or just heavy data usage, you may be SOL, or at least annoyed by having to work with a connection reminiscent of dial-up.

In the end, she had to crawl back to Comcast and dig out her cable modem  again. But we still use the MiFi for traveling, and it's about to save us $10 night when we're in a hotel next week in Portland and hanging out in airports, both which charge for internet usage, sadly.