The 2 Best Wi-Fi Hotspots of 2024

Top pick

The Inseego MiFi X Pro 5G UW works on a fast and wide-ranging 5G network and has sufficient battery life to reach the end of all but the longest workdays.

This brick of a device is the best hotspot for people who actually need one, with quality coverage, fast 5G performance, long-enough battery life, and service plans that offer far more data than the competition.

It offers faster speeds than other Wi-Fi hotspots in our testing. The Verizon Inseego MiFi X Pro 5G UW delivered the speediest downloads and uploads, at 325.06 Mbps and 66.88 Mbps, respectively. The tradeoff here is slower speeds compared to what T-Mobile’s 5G network can deliver, as confirmed in repeated third-party tests that led us to recommend T-Mobile as the best wireless carrier for data. But in our testing, the hotspots T-Mobile sells don’t translate that network capacity into performance you’ll see on a laptop or tablet.

Verizon offers more data. And Verizon’s plans—postpaid and prepaid—allow more use of that bandwidth than you can buy at AT&T or T-Mobile, with your options topping out at 150 GB for $100 postpaid or prepaid. If you already have a current unlimited-data smartphone plan with Verizon, discounts on the carrier’s postpaid plans can cut the hotspot cost to $80 a month. If you have one of its recent high-end plans—the kind with enough hotspot data to eliminate the need for most people to get a dedicated hotspot—the hotspot rate drops to $60 a month. If, however, you already have a prepaid phone line with Verizon, you should qualify for a $30 discount on any of its prepaid hotspot data-only lines.

Verizon data-plan options

Information current as of December 4, 2024. Data allotments on older plans may vary.

You’re not necessarily shut down after hitting the data cap. Exceeding the caps on Verizon’s hotspot data plans can leave you throttled to a useless 600 Kbps data speed—but the carrier’s postpaid and prepaid plans include a sizable carveout that grants you 3 Mbps bandwidth above those quotas if you’re on Verizon’s C-band or millimeter-wave coverage, as flagged by the hotspot showing “5G UW” (short for “ultra wideband”) next to the signal-strength display.

Average connection speeds from our December 2024 round of testing.

It delivers solid battery life that you can extend. In our battery test—tethering a laptop to the hotspot, with that PC’s Chrome browser playing a YouTube livestream—the MiFi X Pro 5G UW lasted an average of 9 hours 20 minutes. But because it offers wired connectivity via both its USB-C port and an old-school Ethernet port, you can stretch that battery life by plugging your laptop into the hotspot. Note, however, that the Ethernet port isn’t active by default; you’ll have to skip through a few menus on its touchscreen interface to fix that.

It offers charging flexibility. The MiFi X Pro 5G UW’s USB-C port should work with any USB-C charger, and the device does not push a complaint to its screen if you ignore the charger in the box to use another company’s hardware. You can also use this hotspot’s battery to charge other devices, provided its own battery hasn’t descended below 25% of a charge.

This hotspot comes with the right Wi-Fi options. The MiFi X Pro 5G UW meets the usual wireless requirements: It can share its bandwidth via the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands (the former prioritizes range, the latter speed) to up to 32 devices (unusually high for this category), and it support the Wi-Fi 6 standard, which can yield slight improvements in reliability and performance in crowded spaces. This hotspot also supports a guest network that can reduce the anxiety of giving your hotspot’s regular wireless password to somebody you just met, but that isn’t on by default.

Inseego provides useful configuration options. You can also block a device connected to this hotspot via its admin interface, reachable in a browser at a my.jetpack address that didn’t work in Chrome unless we prefixed it with “http://” and then clicked past a security warning. The default admin password on our review unit was a random alphanumeric string instead of “admin,” but the hotspot prompted us to change it to a password meeting a complexity requirement of at least eight characters, with one uppercase, one lowercase, one digit, one special character. Finally, we can’t overlook one option that frequent travelers should appreciate: a Stealth Mode setting (which would be better named “small hotel room mode”) that turns off its screen and sound.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Its battery life could be better. This hotspot doesn’t last as long as older, 4G-only hotspots from Verizon. If you have a newer laptop with an efficiency-optimized processor, you may find that you’ll need to charge the hotspot off the laptop after 10 hours.

Verizon is no T-Mobile. Verizon’s 5G network is no match for T-Mobile’s in terms of observed download and upload speeds. But that performance hasn’t shown up in T-Mobile’s limited selection of hotspots, and T-Mobile’s data-only plans don’t come close to Verizon’s in catering to data-intensive users—as in, the kind of people who would be in the market for a hotspot at all.

It’s slow to boot up and install software updates. The MiFi X Pro 5G UW also takes an irritatingly long time to boot up—more than a minute and a half, which may not seem like much in the abstract until you need to jump online right away to address some task that a phone browser can’t handle. Updates to its firmware are excruciatingly longer in comparison, taking the device offline for as long as 20 minutes.