No. Sprint nor any carrier is going to activate a data plan on a commercial router device at only $.60 a gig, $6.00 a gig is more realistic. Actually, $8-$9 is more the normal price…
That’s probably the only drawback of the peplink device – it’s frustrating that you can get such a better rate for data on a hotspot device but have to pay 10x more for the same data if you want to run a quality router. I almost regret buying the max transit cat 18. It’s a great piece of equipment, but the cost at $8-9/GB is expensive enough that I might have to go back to a cheaper device so I don’t have to watch the data meter constantly. Hard being rural where there is no other option for Internet. And having a quality pepwave sit unused will be excruciating if I have to buy and use a cheap router to afford data service
A lot of resellers seem to be bundling MoFi devices. I’d much rather use a peplink device and find it frustrating that a number of good-priced data plans are requiring the use of a MoFi or GL router. (not sure what the deals are between resellers and carriers or how resellers choose which device to require/bundle.)
It is the only drawback that I see to the peplink devices, but it is a major drawback in my view since it makes a pepwave either difficult or very expensive to use.
When I started and metered plans were the norm, it was much easier because you could use a quality device like a pepwave and pay the same amount as anyone else to use data. So the pepwave was a clear win.
Now you can use unlimited data on your iphone, stream video to your tv from your phone and use oodles of bandwidth, etc., but the retail plans to simply have a laptop have a quality connection in a rural area are getting more and more limited in number. While everything is getting more bloated because everyone else is in an “unlimited” world.
I guess the carrier figures if you have a quality router, you’ll use more data (although every phone that ships now is set to sync all photos and video to the cloud, so really, the current data situation is frustrating.)
I don’t know. It just seems frustrating beyond belief that you can use the same data at 1/10 the price if you want to fiddle with fragile t9 antenna connectors or reboot a hotspot once a week, but if you want to have a router that is stable and really nice like a pepwave, you have to pay 10x more for the exact same data.
Hopefully 5G will bring better options, but right now it’s an odd game trying to get a data plan. And it will probably be at least a few more years before 5G is built out here.
It sure would be a dream if there were some way pepwave could get in with major carriers so you could get a good data plan for it. Wouldn’t mind paying a little more for data, but 10x as much every month for the same data to use a quality pepwave device vs. a cheaper hotspot router?
I’ll send you a PM. Up until last fall we had a Sprint unlimited (truly - no throttling) plan with worked with Pepwave LTEA routers and it was a bit less than $60/month.
