Alcatel LINKZONE | Mobile Wifi Hotspot | 4G LTE Router MW41TM | Up to 150Mbps Download Speed | WiFi Connect Up to 15 Devices | Create A WLAN Anywhere | GSM Unlocked

I've waited several months to write this review because I wanted to thoroughly test it out in the Dominican Republic where it will be primarily used. First off, not any mw41 hotspot will work on all 3 major carriers. It has to be this model MW41NF-2AOFUS1 unlocked. 4G Lte bands:B1 (2100) B2 (1900) B3 (1800) B4 (AWS) B5 (850) B7 (2600) B8 (900) B12 (700) B13 (700) B20 (800) 3G UTMS: 850/900/1700/1900/2100 2G: 850/900/1800/1900 MHZ Also, this hotspot also supports USSD codes as found via web browser to the hotspot's IP address. You won't find the USSD page using the alcatel link app. You need this to be able to add a recharge (recarga) of packets (paqueticos) from which you can add unlimited internet for 1 day, 3 days, and 5 days and whatever else you find when going through the USSD menu system. ( its not really unlimited as you will find there is a data cap depending on your usage). I do all this using a pre-paid SIM card. I don't want to get stuck in any monthly contracts. This specific model will give you compatibility with all 3 major cellphone carriers which are Altice, Claro and Viva. I have all 3 SIM cards that i juggle around depending on what part of the country I am in. Why you ask? Because not all carriers have the same network coverage. So from what I have tested, Altice has an excellent coverage area and excellent LTE speeds so this is what I primarily use. When adding money to your Altice pre-paid SIM card (I use recharge.com), they offer something that the other carriers don't offer which is double LTE bandwidth for just 50 pesos more. Using the USSD page in the hotspot, I usually add an unlimited internet "paquetico" for 5 days for 139.00 pesos (2.78 usd) and the menu will ask if you want to add double bandwidth LTE for 50 pesos (1.00 usd) which i always do. I usually get between 50 to 75 mb on the downstream and about 20 to 30 mb on the upstream. After you run out of paqueticos (internet) you will be throttled down to about 256k until you add a recharge. Let me mention here that I only pay for the 5 day plan at a time and it seems to only give about 10gigs of data to use so if you consume it all on the first day you will have to add more recharge to your account. I know it sucks but it all depends what you are using it for. To initiate the USSD menu system for ALTICE, enter #100# from the USSD page. Claro which is the largest carrier and probably has the most customers and best coverage map but I find their network to be somewhat unstable from time to time especially for voip calls where their network shows very high jitter and some latency issues depending on where you are. I consider Claro my backup plan if I am not within a metropolitan area or major city of the country. They also throttle down when your paquetico runs out and their bandwidth on a good day is about 20 to 30 mb on the downstream and about 10mb on the upstream. To initiate the USSD menu system for CLARO, enter *112# from the USSD page. Viva now is truly the underdog here. Their coverage map is no where near as good as Altice and Claro but in the major citys you will find really good LTE coverage with great speeds. I was working one day using my altice SIM when during some heavy rains i noticed my speeds dropped to 500k. I quickly swapped out the SIM card for the Viva SIM and boom! I was back up with great speeds (about the same as Claro) all while it was raining and was able to continue working. I highly recommend having a SIM for all 3 carriers just in case and depending where you will be. They only cost about 100 to 150 pesos to obtain. That's like 2 to 3 USD. When adding a recharge, the USSD menu system has an entry to pay for up to 28 days at a time for 540 pesos (10.80 usd). I haven't seen this on altice and claro. To initiate the USSD menu system for VIVA, enter #123# from the USSD page. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES: DO NOT purchase your SIM cards from the AIRPORTS!!!! (unless you feel like being raped of your money) find a mall, a grocery store or anywhere else that sells them. You will need your passport to get it in your name. Supports USSD codes (not all hotspots have this feature) All 3 carriers throttle down when your recharge is done. If you are from the USA or any other country where cell phone WiFi-Calling is supported, your phone will work very well through this hotpsot. No one will know you are out of town and no roaming charges and anyone calling you wont hear that international ring tone when dialing your number. If you conduct business over the internet back to the USA or any other country and want to appear as if you are in that country, get yourself a VPN account which has many other benefits as well. (do your research) After adding a recharge to your SIM account and activating a paquetico plan, you must reboot the hotspot FOR TRAVELERS: When traveling to the Dominican Republic, what I do is just before I catch my flight to DR, I purchase a recharge online using recharge.com. There are other sites but I think this one is the better one to use. Once my plane lands and is on the way to the gate, I turn on the hotspot, log in to it via web browser and add the paquetico unlimited internet plan for 5 days and before I even get off the plane I am fully connected, phone works, full internet and business as usual. edit 1-14-2020: I have done more verification in the DR trying to confirm what LTE bands are actually being used and my findings show: Altice uses LTE Bands: 2,4,5,8 Claro and Viva are using LTE Bands: 2,4,5,7 depending where you are. This hotspot, MW41NF-2AOFUS1, supports it all.

Spent hours with AT&T to understand what device to get searched for it on Amazon. The description on Amazon said UNLOCKED GSM COMPATABLE WITH AT&T. UNTRUE. Called ALCATEL: they said many AT&T customers call them and thei system shows my device was shipped to HONG KONG. I live in Oregon and Amazon shipped it to my address in Oregon. Alcatel also said contrary to Amazon description this device is not comparable with AT&T and AT&T cannot activate it, TMobile can! So I will go to Best Buy and get a TMobile mobile WiFi device off the shelf. Do yourself a favor and do not buy this device. First time I have this kind of problem with Amazon. False advertising!!!

I purchased this after reading reviews that it works with Cricket Wireless. Unfortunately as of January 2021 Cricket no longer allows devices with out voice capabilities to be used on their network. They even suspended my line and I had to call to get it reactivated. Cricket is allowing users who have activated non-voice devices on the network before January 2021 to continue to use them until 2022. This hotspot was compact and looked like it was easy to activate and available at a great price. I would have really liked to be able to use it and it is definitely not the sellers fault that it would not work for me so I gave a 5 star rating. I just thought I would provide this information for others who would like to use it with Cricket wireless.

I bought this device before going on a trip to Europe, I wanted to test it before I travel so I used Mintmobile sim card and it didn't work. I contacted Amazon who brought the tech support on the phone line and I was informed it is Mintmobile issue. I took my chance and I hoped it will work in Europe with Orange sim, and it did, it worked perfectly with Orange sim in Iceland, France and Italy. We had 4 phones connected it all the time, we were using Wifi calling on our cell phones thru this device. The battery never ran out because every time we get into the car we plug it in, but I think it has a decent battery. When We came back to the US I really wanted to use it with Minmobile, so I checked Mintmobile website and it has the direction to setup Android devices to use mobile data, and it worked. It works much better than my phone hotspot. Here why I deducted one star, sometimes I lose connection to the internet, and the device is dead, nothing happens when I press the power button. The only way to make it work again is remove the battery for a couple of minutes and put it back then the device will work again ( note is never happened with Orange Sim, it only happened with Mintmobile sim). For $55 it is a very good deal, especially it worked as 4G most of the time in all those countries, it used 3G only when I was in France in the middle of nowhere, so I really appreciated having internet there.

Update: Could no longer read SIM cards after 2 years of light use. Died while in Europe, so I replaced it with a European frequencies device that has more non-US bands. I'm back to 2 travel hotspots with 1 for the US with all the T-Mobile bands and 1 for the rest of the world. The Alcatel MW41NF is the best hotspot I have found that can be used in the US and Europe. I needed to replace my European hotspot so I ordered the MW41NF. It was unlocked with no branding and has been used successfully in the US and Europe. Unfortunately, the display lights are barely useful. The light for Signal is either on or off. There is no indication of signal level. If I touch the power button, the lights 'blip' on to show me it's working. But at times it seems to take holding the power more than the documented 4 seconds to power the unit on or off. There is a cell phone app called Linkzone. I found that connecting via a browser much more useful. For example, the profile can only be changed via a browser connection and not via the app. I just don't see the need for the app. Finally a warning about holding the power button too long. I was confused if the unit was on or off and wanted to make sure it was off. I held the power button too long and reset the unit to factory specs. The manual says holding the power button for 10 seconds will reboot the unit. All I can say is that my 'reboot' reset everything even though the manual says you have to hold both power and WPS to reset the unit. In my case this was catastrophic because I was using a European SIM that requires a PIN code on power up. Normally I can enter the pin once and the unit will provide the PIN on each power up. I was away from the location I had the PIN code so my unit was out of commission for a day. As soon as I could, I took a picture of the PIN and PUK codes with my cell phone so I could reprogram the unit If it reset again. Previously I had 2 hotspots. One for the US and one for Europe because I couldn't find an affordable hotspot that covered LTE bands for both places. The MW41NF covers most of the T-Mobile bands in the US: 2, 4, 5, 12 and every band needed in Europe 3, 7, 20. My phone carrier is Google Fi which means I have extra data SIMs that share my account. In the US Fi uses T-Mobile for data SIM and this unit covers more current T-Mobile bands than my old used T-Mobile branded hotspot. Europe is easy since all the countries uses one or more of the same three bands and Fi has roaming agreements with all of them. For long term stays I do buy local data SIMs to cut my data costs. I had a problem with a data SIM from the Greek carrier CosmOTE. After inserting the SIM, I discovered a new profile had been created. I have no idea if the profile came from Alcatel or CosmOTE, but it didn't work. I finally figured out the problem was the "Dial Number" which is a required field on the Alcatel. I replaced the previous entry with the number 2. Then it worked fine. I have been unable to determine the syntax of that field, but believe it is not used in modern applications.

So fast !!! I am using T mobile unlimited plan and I put my sim card in this machine. I put two steam games on download list since steam always has the fastest speed. Download starts at 10 pm and until next morning 9 am, 89 GB was downloaded. I was thinking about something close to 15 GB but this result really shocked me. I love this machine. Really easy to use and great for travel. Also, I put some of the home utilities, such as wifi outlets and lights, on this router so they won't occupy any ip address on my home internet system. Plus, I want to mention that only sim card bought from major companies, like tmobile att version, has hotspot function. My friend has an unlimited plan with lycamobile, which rent out tmobile frequencies, but it doesn't work with any hotspot device.

Hard to really say much about the functionality of the device itself because I couldn't even set it up due to the fact that I don't have an account with T-Mobile. I powered the device up after putting a full charge on the battery, then pulled out my laptop and entered the IP address of the device into Google Chrome and the resulting page download is completely branded by T-Mobile and plainly states that I must have an account with them and an active data plan to go any further. To continue with setup, I must log into my account it says. But I don't have an account with T-Mobile mainly because they have ZERO signal reception 30 miles in any direction from where I live. I expect this type of end result when buying from 3rd party sellers, but this is was 100% on Amazon. There isn't a single word I'm the item details/description that would make you think that this device was locked to any carrier at all, and certainly didn't specify that T-Mobile was the carrier this particular one must utilize. I've been days without internet access at this point because this waste of time was actually my 2nd attempt at replacing a LTE router of mine that suddenly crapped out. The first LTE router I purchased was returned to the 3rd party seller on the day it was to be delivered by UPS because the box it was shipped in was found open with nothing inside it. I call Amazon the next day because I still haven't received a refund and the best they can do is "push" the refund through, but according to the agent I spoke with, it could be 48 hours before the funds were applied to an Amazon gift card. It didn't take 48 hours, but it was the next day before it showed up in my Amazon wallet. I already had this Alcatel hotspot picked out and was ready to order when I realized I didn't even have the option to pay for expedited shipping to get this ordeal over with as soon as possible. So I call Amazon once again to see what gives because it's not just this item I found that didn't provide a one day shipping alternative - no matter what item I put in my cart, 2 day free Prime shipping was the only possible shipping option. Amazon has no idea why this is happening according to the agent and begs for time to figure out the issue. I'm trying to expedite the shipping of a device I want to purchase and they need time to sort through it all and get back to me. What a joke. I still haven't heard back from anyone at Amazon regarding my lack of shipping options, and I'm not surprised. After all that I had been through, Amazon couldn't even offer me one day shipping even if I paid for it myself. The best they could do was give me a $10 credit that could only be used on an item shipped and sold by Amazon, which is why I selected the device this review is aimed at. It has now been 4 days since I handed this item off to UPS to return to Amazon, and once again my money is frozen in their hands and I am at their mercy to get it back in mine so I can purchase my 3rd router in less than 2 weeks. Find another alternative if you are considering this hotspot because there are just too many things that could go wrong if you don't.

It says on that it is compatible with Verizon but after two long phone calls with Verizon and having to buy a plan just to see if it works (at the advisement of the Verizon rep...of course), they confirmed it is not compatible. IS compatible with Team Mobile.

Good.Must Buy this again with same Seller(Sold By: NETWORKING DEALS)

Para lo que sirve, es más que suficiente, con un precio bajo. Lo más complejo es encontrar como quitar la verificación de PIN al arranque.

Lo adquirí pensando en solucionar problemas intermitentes con el servicio de internet contratado en casa. Y al momento ha funcionado correctamente aun con 5 ususarios conectados. La capacidad de descarga de datos es baja, pero mantiene buen desempeño en conexiones de video conferencia sin encender la cámara.

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Used this for about 2 month in Jamaica. Worked great. I locked myself out of the app, so I was unable to monitor my usage and I couldn’t figure out how to reset it. But other then that it gave me wifi when I needed it.