My mother wants to pay $30 a month for Verizon hotspot
 

I've never set one up. Is it easy to do this for free? I don't want to root her phone.

Depends on the phone. Some will work without rooting. There are scare stories out there about Verizon recognizing unauthorized tethering or hotspot usage and blowing up your billing, but I've never heard of anyone actually getting busted for it.

Is she wanting to tether using her phone or is she buying the mifi hotspot dongle to use? If it is the hotspot dongle thing they are reasonably simple to setup I believe. A lot of the government people I work with use them on travel a ton.

She wants to tether the phone to her laptop. They go on the road with a 5th wheel quite a bit and she's tired of not being able to get wifi on her laptop. It is embarrassing to tell people that my 70 year old mother has a better phone/laptop than I do (I still have a dumb phone).

Do you know the phone make and model?

Theres another hot spot option, that depending on how much she uses it and where its free. I think its called freedom pop or something. I know a few racers that use it because it give data coverage in some areas that arent covered otherwise.

Setting up the verizon one is easy though. You just order one and turn it on when it gets there. You probably should adjust the settings in it so its a bit more secure, but that should be covered in the instructions.

Wait so is she looking at something like a jet pack that uses the same data plan as her phone or some other device that actually uses the phone to tether? I use a jetpack for work and it was incredibly easy to setup. I think it took me all of two minutes and it is automatically encrypted with a password. It also has a much better receiver than my phone does so it provides me with stable internet where my phone does not get signal.

On my rooted Nexus I use the app Wifi Tether Plus just fyi. I have been reasonably happy with it.

I use the $5 app easytether on my att phone and have never had an issue. The app seriously works great for hte price. I can't comment on verizon being assholes about using it... I had to drop those dbags a while ago because well... they are dbags.

I have a jetpack that I use for work. It works great. At my cabin I usually have ok cell service (2/3 bars). We used the jetpack and could run 2 laptops working all day + my daughter was streaming hulu and google movies at the same time. We usually have 10 devices running on it while we are up there. Worked awesome! I have also used it on our road trips for my daughter to watch movies. She will stream tv/movies on her tablet while we drive. It worked through MN -> Iowa and part of Mo on our way to STL. The only places we couldn't stream in the car were places with ZERO service (not even 1X). The battery life says 14 hours, but we had it turned on for 11 hours of driving and I still had 1/2 the battery life indicated on the hotspot.

Super easy to use

The jetpack seems like the better option. She can get one for a buck, add it to her plan, and use the same data allowance and it's only $20 extra a month.

I've been using FoxFi on my Galaxy 4S (with Verizon) for about six months, and I love it. There are certain combinations of phone / OS build that it doesn't work with, but they have both a compatibility matrix and a free trial version.

No rooting required, works with WiFi (some are USB-only), and has generally been perfect.

Sounds like I need to do some further research for her. I'll find out the model of her phone and post it. I'm a cheap ass and it sounded like $30 (or even $20) a month extra to do this was way too expensive.

On my nexus 5 with my $50/month unlimited data T-Mobile plan, I go into settings and hit the "enable wi-fi hotspot" button.

I'm actually out of town for work, using this very option to send this message.

Unfortunately, if she's on the road a lot, T-Mobile probably isn't going to go over very well in the coverage department.

It is worth noting that the Verizon network will not allow you to do voice and data at the same time, which means any time she's using the hotspot, voice calls will not work (I can't remember if incoming calls go straight to voicemail, or if it bumps the hotspot off temporarily).

This may not be a consideration at all, but just figured I'd point it out.

She has a Motorola Razr M.

Looks like that FoxFi/PdaNet will work for USB/WiFi tethering if she's still on 4.3. If she has accepted the OTA upgrade to 4.4, then it will only work for USB tethering, not as a WiFi hotspot.

FoxFi Devices

So, that's your non-rooted, non-paying-Verizon-$30-a-month option.



BTW: That's a fantastic device. I loved mine for the short time I had it. I should have kept it and activated it on my company line instead of accepting the company-provided iPhone.

PDANet worked flawlessly for me when I was with Sprint.

Check her Verizon plan, ours allows us to tether as part of the plan using the built in Verizon Hotspot app (we have HTC One M7s).