MiFi mobile hotspot review

Like most things from Three that I’ve have had the misfortune to use, it does not work. The Wifi hardly works at all, I have no signal at home, and I’m near central London and the tech help is useless. The tech help on the phone keeps on asking me what happens when I plug it in; this device does not plug in. At the shop, they insist it works even though they don’t even give a look at it. When I say that the phone tech help asks me what happens when I plug it in, the people in the shop tell me that the people on the phone do not say that.

The tech help on the phone are keen to explain that “there are connexion problems right now”. But there ALWAYS are and they NEVER get fixed. They only want you to give them your phone number so they can tell you about their coverage, which is useless when the device’s wifi does not work. Once they have your number, they use it to SPAM YOU. (See below.)

In short:
* wifi works once in 20 times, on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
* connexion works once in 20 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
* For about two hours of trying to connect, I get about 20 minutes of internet, most of it very sluggish. I once got a 160000 ms ping! That’s almost three minutes. Normal ping for Google should be about 200 ms.
* After you call them for help, not happy with just helping you with an imaginary product you don’t have, THEY SPAM YOU. An automated call calls you the next day to ask you to rate their service.

Crap, useless, expensive. The only worse than the modem is Three’s service. Adorable when you’re buying, either incompetent or arrogant or both once you’ve realised that their useless product DOES NOT WORK!

Looks interesting. What is the range laptop to mifi modem?

Would like to use it between friends on a small campsite.

Kris is obviously one of those rare 3 customers who can get a working connection at all. I have both a 3 USB dongle and a 3 Mifi dongle…. don’t ask why I bought the Mifi dongle when my USB dongle is so chronically bad. 3, for those of you who haven’t heard, provide a notoriously bad service…. it is actually a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act for 3 to call their ropey mobile internet as “Mobile Broadband”. For the large part you can get an intermittent dial-up quality connection but even then it drops regularly and needs constant reconnecting. 3 of course, deny this emphatically and use obvious language barriers between their English customers and their Indian Customer Dis-Service, to completely ignore complaints and disgruntlement.

The Mifi dongle itself is nice, its small for what it does and looks tidy and modern. There are five colour coded lights on the modem which indicate various things such as signal strength, Wifi enabled, internet connected, battery status, etc. As usual with 3 dongles, you can ignore the internet status lights: a light blue LED is meant to indicate a HSDPA connection but I am using the dongle now and its connection, despite the light blue LED, is paint drying speeds. A Facebook page takes around a minute to fully load and using more than one browsing tab is impossible as the 3 connection doesn’t seem to like concurrent instructions and downloads. Which gives rise to an important point: yes its true you can connect five devices to the Mifi dongle at once, but they can do very little insofar as the internet connection becomes as slow as a sleuth swimming through glue….. its truly dreadful and if you’re like me, you’ll switch the Mifi modem off and opt to do something far more quicker such as watching paint dry – it really is that bad. My verdict: avoid the unnecessary expense of buying a 3 product that won’t work and choose another network altogether!