Verizon has introduced new mobile hotspot plans, with four options to choose from starting at 15GB for $20 per month up to 150GB for $80 per month. They offer standalone and unlimited plan add-on mobile hotspot data that’s ready to be taken on the road. Maybe in a Class B Winnebago Solis with a pop-up sleeping compartment, as featured on Wheel of Fortune, south through the redwoods and along the coast and then on through the painted deserts of the Southwest. What? I said that out loud? I mean, hypothetically.
Anyway, the most basic plan, Essential, offers low-band Nationwide 5G and 4G LTE connectivity. The three more expensive plans — creatively named Plus, Pro, and Premium — include Ultra Wideband 5G, which encompasses the very fast, limited-range mmWave flavor of 5G as well as upcoming mid-band spectrum that should deliver broad coverage and fast performance.
The plans promise certain monthly premium data allotments; if they’re exceeded, data will be slower for the remainder of the month. Essential and Plus are available to Verizon customers, while Pro and Premium can be either added to an unlimited plan or purchased as standalone products.
This is all well and good, but while we’re on the subject of unlimited plans, let’s not forget that some of us (me) pay for unlimited data on Verizon that inexplicably can’t be used via mobile hotspot. Let’s say (hypothetically) you’re sitting around your freezing cold house in March during a power outage waiting for the heat and the Wi-Fi to come back on and you think you’d like to get a little work done by switching on your phone’s mobile hotspot feature. Nope! Because you picked the cheapest unlimited plan, you’re stuck working on offline Google Docs until the power comes back.
Well, now I (hypothetically) have a couple of options: pay up for a premium unlimited plan (which is exactly what The Man wants us to do), or buy a mobile hotspot, load that baby up with Premium Unlimited hotspot data and take off on a dreamy #vanlife tour of the Pacific Coast in an imaginary Winnebago Solis. The white one, not the red one. Let’s not get carried away.
