Verizon MiFi 8800L Update

[jasonl78]

Not a lot of chatter lately about jetpacks or hotspots so I thought I would post an update about mine. The quick story is that I am nearly ready to give up on this unit. I bought the 8800L in February. I originally bought it on the post paid plan. I quickly realized that Verizon stayed true to their word that they would throttle my device to 600 Kbps after 15 GB of high speed data. That wasn't going to work for me so I switched to the prepaid plan. I was excited about having this device. It's portable and at $65/month, it was cheaper than my landline based internet. That's about where the love affair ends. I live 30 miles north of a major metropolitan area but close enough to reasonably sized city that my coverage is good. The Verizon map shows great coverage for my area. I struggle with getting good signal. Bar strength is anywhere from 1 to 3 bars. Speed tests yield anywhere from 1.5 Mbps to as much as 30 Mbps. I bought a few different external antenna to try and help with what I think is signal strength issues. I didn't see much, if any, improvement in strength. I've been just dealing with it. It's tolerable. But what has been driving me crazy about it is that it keeps dropping my wifi connections. It's very random. Sometimes I can be connected for hours on end (watching movies, listening to music or browsing the web) and other times it may kick me off multiple times within an hour. I have called Verizon prepaid tech support 4 times this week about it. Every time they guarantee me that they have fixed the problem. I told them that I am to the point where either they are going to send me a new device (or sim card) or I am going to end my 15 year relationship with them. Of course they won't admit they have a problem with the device and that I need to work with a corporate store to get a new sim card or device. I would accept the fact that maybe my location is the problem except for the fact that I brought the device to work today (I work in the major metropolitan area) and had multiple people connect to the device and after about 4.5 hours it started cutting out. Either I have a bad one or they are just not that good of a unit. Anyone else experience dropping wifi? At this point, I can't say that I would recommend this unit.

[Scousers]

We have problems with it dropping the internet connection but it maintains the wifi link to our devices. Have to restart it to get internet connection back. This seems to happen randomly, will be rock solid for days and then act up.

Speeds are fairly slow...currently 2.6 Mbps at home


Beats having nothing I guess

[Calnca]

"So far" happy with our prepaid plan. Only had it drop once in last month.....and we were at the coast near Ventura, so Verizon signal, even on phone was only 1 bar.

Will be going to the coast near the Redwoods next week, will be interesting to see how it performs then. Only generally use it for iPad/computer/phone internet connection, as we have sat TV.....but obviously with overhead cover that's not always available.