This plan is meant to be used with the hotspot on your cell phone-but you have other options, too, if you plan to use a separate hotspot device, including our favorite budget pick farther down on this page. But it’s enough to let you browse online, stream video, and attend Zoom meetings with relative ease, so long as you aren’t connecting too many devices to your hotspot. Granted, that’s a lot slower than what you’ll get on 4G or 5G. Instead of cutting off after you’ve reached your hotspot data cap, T-Mobile will slow down your speeds to 3G levels, which usually range from 0.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps. On top of that, it comes with 40 GB of high-speed data just for your hotspot. It comes with totally unlimited phone data, giving you top speeds over high-speed, 4G LTE and 5G networks with no caps on premium data.
Although it’s primarily meant for your phone, it can serve double duty as your hotspot plan, which will save you a lot of money and still give you plenty of data to work with.
Magenta MAX is a cell phone plan with hotspotting included. Most other hotspot and cellular plans make it a bit of a pain to get lots of data for hotspot use, but you won’t have to worry with this plan. The good news is that cellular providers have been offering more hotspot data lately as demand has grown for hotspots and other alternative internet sources. Most hotspot plans have strict data caps, giving you as little as a couple gigabytes per month. Wireless internet speeds are slower and mobile infrastructure is mostly built for serving phone users, not internet customers, so data comes at a higher price and you get less. You usually can’t get unlimited hotspot data because cellular carriers don’t have the same internet capacity as traditional internet providers. Why can’t you get unlimited hotspot data? We decided to highlight a cell phone plan here because it’s rare, if not outright impossible, to find a standalone Wi-Fi hotspot plan that gives you unlimited data.
3G is really slow but it will be enough to let you check emails. Costing $85 per month, it gives you 40 GB of monthly high-speed data (averaging around 30–50 Mbps) followed by unlimited data at 3G speeds (0.5–3 Mbps). T-Mobile’s Magenta MAX cell phone plan is the best plan you can get for unlimited hotspot data.