Verizon Ellipsis Jetpack MHS900L Review - Review 2022

Non every production nosotros review at PCMag is a must-buy, simply the clunkers assist remind us just how good the winners are. That's the instance with the Verizon Ellipsis Jetpack MHS900L ($149.99, or $29.99 with a two-year contract), a good-looking merely under-featured wireless hotspot that but highlights how skillful our Editors' Choice, the Jetpack MiFi 7730L, really is.

Cost

I see where Verizon is coming from here. The MHS900L (made past Franklin Wireless) is a pared-downwardly hotspot designed to hitting a low price point. Merely particularly with a two-year contract, prices have flattened out so much that they tin can't justify the deviation in performance. The MHS900L costs $29.99 with a two-yr contract and $149.99 without. Verizon'southward 2 much better hotspots, the AC791L and 7730L, each cost $49.99/$199.99.

Why become a hotspot, anyway? Tin can't you just use your phone? A dedicated hotspot doesn't drain your telephone bombardment. Good ones take meliorate signal force and range than most phones. And businesses oftentimes won't pay individual workers' phone bills, but they'll pay for hotspots to be shared by their teams.

In that location's one thing you shouldn't exist using a hotspot for: your primary home internet access. Verizon's service plans but don't offer enough data for you to surf all month on, affordably. (Its "unlimited" plan includes 15GB of loftier-speed data; the boilerplate American habitation uses 190GB per calendar month.) The vast bulk of one-star reviews on Verizon's site come up from people running upwardly against that data cap and existence reduced to 600kbps for the residual of the month.

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Design

An attractive matte black puck, the MHS900L measures 2.34 by 3.46 past 0.57 inches (HWD) and weighs ii.79 ounces. On the back panel, there'southward a micro USB charging port. (You tin't use information technology as a USB-tethered modem.) A two-line, monochrome display shows battery, indicate forcefulness, and the number of devices connected, by default. Tap the power button to see your usage data, SSID, and password; you tin use the web interface to change those.

As a router, you'll likely find the hotspot'southward options to exist limited. You become IPv6 and port filtering, but no MAC filtering. There's a firewall with no manageable options other than VPN pass-through. And there are none of the more than arcane options in higher-stop modern routers, similar speed tests or time-based usage restrictions.

Performance

Hotspots live and dice on their connectivity, and the MHS900L merely isn't great in that regard.

As a router, the MHS900L only supports 8 devices on 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi. At that place's no 5GHz pick, which means you lot will be admittedly hosed in crowded Wi-Fi weather like many offices or conference rooms. Since our examination lab is absolutely lousy with ii.4GHz networks, we got just 40 anxiety of range from the MHS900L to a MacBook Pro laptop, as compared to 150 feet with a 7730L set to 5GHz.

The modem is the absolute minimum Verizon 4G LTE modem available: LTE form 3, with a maximum speed of 100Mbps down, supporting just bands iv and 13. It has no 3G or 2G fallback, and no roaming bands. The 7730L peaks at 600Mbps and supports bands 2, iv, 5, 13, and 66 in the US, every bit well equally 3G and overseas roaming bands.

In eight tests in unlike locations throughout New York Urban center, the 7730L managed consistently amend signal than the 900L did, at one point showing 15dBm stronger bespeak than the smaller hotspot. The 900L has no external antenna port to improve its point.

Bottom

Download speeds topped the 900L's on six out of viii tests, just that merely tells one-half the story of how superior the 7730L is. The MHS900L's download speeds ranged from 1Mbps downward to 22Mbps downwardly. But the 7730L's download speeds ranged, in the same locations, from 10Mbps to 68Mbps. We can say confidently that y'all will go a stronger, more consistent connection with the 7730L or the AC791L than with this hotspot.

Bombardment life was besides quite disappointing. I streamed YouTube to a phone for 4 hours, 25 minutes before the hotspot died, which is far shorter than I saw with the 7730L or AC791L. The poor connectivity is linked to the poor battery life: When a device has to exert more effort to make a connection, it runs down its battery more chop-chop.

Conclusions

Verizon needs to reconsider its strategy with the Ellipsis line of products. The original idea for Ellipsis, which is a Verizon-owned brand, was that the devices would bandage off 3G in exchange for being bachelor at much lower prices. But the deviation in price merely doesn't justify the difference in quality hither. There is no reason to purchase the MHS900L. While it's slightly less expensive than Verizon's other hotspots, they are so much ameliorate that it's admittedly worth the extra $xx to $50. We prefer the 7730L, as it has the fastest speeds and best roaming options.