ATT Hotspot

[Stephen Newell]

I have a AT&T hotspot for internet service and the thing keeps shutting down. It gives a "No Battery" message even if it's hooked up to electric power. Anyone have any experience with this error message. It started having this problem once or twice a day and now your lucky if it stays on 10 minutes.

 

[tomNE]

different company but problem was the same; the unit was burning out. happened twice. was told my signal was so weak, the unit was over working. they gave me a more heavy duty one; it's now worked 12months with no problem.

 

[Stephen Newell]

Didn't know you could overwork one. The signal where I am is weak due to being in a heavily wooded area plus at times there are three of us at a time on the net.

 

[dieselade]

i have one and my brother has one. both went to doing that late summer. they now use their iphones as a hotspot. i kept using mine and now my contract with the hotspot is done and will probably go with iphone as hotspot. works ok.

att told me two years is the limit on those things. i left mine on all the time. my brother shut his off when not using it. and mine lasted longer.
i m going to att today or tomorrow to see if it is worth it to get a new hotspot. they cost you an extra 20bucks a month whereas the iphone as a hotspot does not cost anything extra to use as a hotspot.

 

[rview_]

(quoted from post at 05:04:05 12/17/15) I have a AT&T hotspot for internet service and the thing keeps shutting down. It gives a "No Battery" message even if it's hooked up to electric power. Anyone have any experience with this error message. It started having this problem once or twice a day and now your lucky if it stays on 10 minutes.

No experience with AT&T since they don't service my area, but I am familiar with cell Internet and how those work.

They can fail at any time. You can buy used ones on ebay or other places as long as they are "clean", nothing due on account, best if they take the same SIM/activation card, and you just swap it out, some are different size and may require an adapter or to order a different size SIM. As long as they support the same frequency in use at your location, they should work, if you check into it unlocked devices from other carriers -might- work as well. To make it easy, you can look for the same model as you have if you want.

You have a few options. Phones as mentioned, hotspot like yours. Also, they have regular Internet/cell routers (where you can plug in networking/ethernet cables). Another option is a usb Internet stick, you can buy a Cradlepoint router and plug one into that.

I use a Huawei router, I have a hotspot for backup. I have a Wilson cell booster in order to get a usable signal. You can buy some hotspots and devices with an antenna port, would be cheaper to direct connect an antenna (good ones with cable can be $50 or so). Not all/many have antenna ports.

Here's an AT&T forum, you could probably find info here, there are others of course too.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/attwireless

 

[Stephen Newell]

I thought about the phone. On some really bad days we sometimes use my wife's cell phone. I'm afraid though if we burned out a hot-spot we might burn out the phone too. It's also AT&T equipment.

 

[John,PA]

BECAREFUL of hot spots.

Some people are just so glad to have one that THEY fail to read a "contract" and find out later how much the bill will be for using the equipment.

John,PA