Verizon Wireless”s PR agency was kind enough to send me an evaluation unit of its new MiFi device today, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes sharing some initial thoughts. For anyone not familiar with it, this is a pocket sized portable WiFi hotspot attached to Verizon’s EVDO network, with the intention of allowing your various devices – laptops, phones, gaming consoles etc. – to easily connect to the Internet in a variety of mobile situations.

The first thing I did was pull it out of the box to see what it looked like. I was actually slightly surprised by how small it was:

It’s less than a centimetre thick, so thinner than my iPhone and quite a bit thinner than my BlackBerry Bold. And the footprint is just a hair larger than a credit card. So it definitely lives up to the “pocket-sized” description and it’s extremely portable (I stuck it in my pocket with my iPhone later on as I went to run some errands and forgot it was there). 

The next step was getting the thing up and running, and there I ran into problems pretty quickly. My main personal computer is a MacBook and so that’s the machine I wanted to use to get it started. But although in theory I was supposed to just plug it in with the supplied USB cable and then follow automatic prompts, nothing happened when I plugged the thing in. No disk image, no simulated CD, nothing. So there was no way of getting the device to do anything useful at all whether automatically or otherwise. I tried unplugging it and plugging it in again several times but no dice. This was somewhat disappointing since the box clearly states that it’s Mac OSX compatible:

If the MacBook was my only device I’d have been out of luck. Fortunately, I have a desktop PC lurking nearby I could use, and so I tried that instead. To cut a long story short:

• the first time I plugged the device in, it caused what the PC later described as “a serious error” – it was unresponsive for several minutes and I had to restart it just to get it to talk to me again.
• the second time, things went better. The device registered, drivers were installed and up popped the VZ AccessManager program that manages devices like these as well as Verizon’s aircards and USB modems. 
• I tried to register the device using the program, but the first time around it failed. The second time (once I’d found an activation item buried in one of the menus) it worked. 
• at this point, the device was finally ready for use.

I switched it on and looked for the wireless access point on my MacBook. Nothing. Refreshed: nothing. Finally, it showed up – it appears that it takes quite a few seconds for the device to be ready after being switched on – nothing too wrong with that, I suppose, once you know. 

The SSID is a long string starting with Verizon MiFi2200 followed by a unique 4-digit number (although if they sell more than 10,000 of these things I guess those numbers won’t be unique anymore). Logging in requires an 11-digit numerical password which is helpfully provided on the back of the device in case you forget or need to show it to someone else using your device.

The first thing I did was run a speed test using my laptop on Speedtest.net – results below:

That’s 1.4Mbit/s down, 360kbit/s up – not too shabby. 178ms of latency – not great, but not terrible either, and fairly standard for WWAN networks. Of course, this is based on the nearest server and so on, so your actual speed is in most cases going to be slower since most of the websites you access aren’t within 50 miles.

I hooked up a second laptop to it and ran a Hulu video on that one while I retested the speed – it came in at around 1Mbit/s, so it seems to handle multiple connected devices pretty well.

So in what situations would this be useful?

The question is, why do you need a device like this? Why not just use a USB modem or similar device that doesn’t require separate power (the MiFi does, of course)? Well, one that sprang to mind immediately was my work laptop, which is so locked down that it’s impossible to install anything on it, including the software that comes with most aircards and modems. I’ve never been able to use any of the several USB modems and aircards I’ve received from Sprint and others on my work laptop because I couldn’t ever install them. Assuming you’ve got somewhere else to get the thing up and running first, this is a nice solution – since it just looks like another WiFi network to my work laptop, it works just fine.

Beyond that fairly limited use case though, are there any others? One that immediately occurred to me (and, I think, was suggested by someone at Sprint last week) was hooking my iPhone up to it while out and about for a speed boost. Theoretically, this only makes sense if AT&T’s 3G network is slower than Verizon’s, which isn’t necessarily true, but I thought I’d give it a try. Using Speedtest.net’s iPhone application (warning: iTunes link), I ran three speed tests – one each for my home WiFi (connected to a 20Mbit/s FiOS connection), the MiFi over Verizon’s EVDO network, and the iPhone’s own 3G connection. The summary is below, in reverse order:

The details are here, in the order I described above (home WiFi, MiFi, iPhone / AT&T 3G):

Obviously, my home WiFi with the superfast backhaul was quickest. But the MiFi also beat the iPhone’s own 3G hands-down – by about a factor of 2 on the dowlink, although very similar on the uplink. Why is this the case? Possibly the particular place where I tested the two networks has better Verizon than AT&T signal. Possibly the design of the MiFi gets a stronger signal than the iPhone. I don’t know for certain, but I won’t complain about that doubling in speed. (Slightly off-topic, I also wondered whether the iPhone’s WiFi capabilities are capped at 10Mbit/s – I regularly get very close to 20Mbit/s when testing my home connection over a laptop).

I took the device with me when I went out to run some errands and discovered that a dead spot in AT&T’s network at the local mall (ironically right by the Apple store) was no longer a problem – I had the MiFi on in my pocket while I checked email and Tweeted from my iPhone and had none of the normal connectivity problems. Use case found.

In theory, there are others too – the marketing materials from Verizon suggest family roadtrips, construction sites, college students in study groups, insurance agents on the road and conferences. All are reasonable suggestions, though most would be just as well served by a USB modem. 

Conclusions

In summary, I found that:

• The MiFi provides good speed – even an improvement over the native 3G on my iPhone, and plenty of downstream speed to get work done on the road
• The activation process was cumbersome and would have been a show-stopper if I only had my MacBook. I wonder why an activation process involving installed software and drivers is even necessary – the thing never needs to connect to my laptop after that anyway – why not just let me activate it online and avoid all that hassle?
• There will be some use cases for some people – but probably not for everyone, and that’s fine. USB modems will be just peachy for many people and some people don’t need a mobile broadband connection at all
• I haven’t had it long enough to worry about this or really be able to comment on it yet, but compared with a USB modem I can imagine that remembering to recharge might be a pain.
• The device is truly extremely portable, to the extent that you could chuck it in the same pocket as your phone without an issue and would probably forget it was there (as I did).

Thank you Verizon, for sending me a trial device. I’ll be using it quite a bit over the next couple of months until I have to give it back. It’s probably also worth noting that the underlying device is the same as the Sprint device that also launched recently, so most of what I say here would go for Sprint’s version too – including, most likely, the network performance, which should be similar on Sprint’s EVDO.

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