There are a couple of drawbacks, principally:
- Like any cell modem it’s only as good as your cell provider’s coverage in the area you are located. This is not unique to the MoFi though. Any cell modem is going to have this limitation.
- The SIM7 model which I have does not support LTE-A also called Carrier Aggregation where all of the available and usable band signals can be aggregated to get a faster speed. Instead, it’s speed relies on you making some adjustments with every trip when you arrive at your destination. You scan for available bands, then lock onto each band, perform a speed test or two (I do three and then average the results for each band), then move on to the next. Once you’ve done this for each, you go back and lock back into whatever band have you the fastest speed test result. It sounds complicated but it’s not and it takes no more than 30-minutes to do, but some folks don’t want to be bothered with that. The SIM4 model does have that feature though!
- Its not a CAT-18 modem so you won’t get those 60mbps speeds @VTPete was seeing from his Pepwave MaxTransit Duo.
- I don’t think it supports 4x4 MIMO but I might be wrong about that.
Ultimately, it works for my needs just fine though. We’re full time and I do Zoom Calls all day without issue, emails, web browsing, coding, source code management, all of it. At night, we use it to stream. 90% of the time, we can stream HD without issue. The other 10% of the time, we just have bad coverage and we need to move or make adjustments but that’s not something I can fault the device for.
I don’t have external antennas. I just have it 3M’d to the inside of my windshield below the tint line. Gets power from the OHC above the driver. If I added external antennas, I might get better speeds but the paddle antennas it comes with have served me fine. I regularly pull 30mbps down and 15 mbps up - enough for all four of us to stream at standard definition simultaneously on separate devices or for two devices to stream HD simultaneously.
if your wife is doing really massive uploads and downloads though, for example if she were a graphic artist or video editor, I could see springing for the MaxTransit Duo to get those super speeds. Also, the MaxTransit Duo device is a little more future proof. The MoFi will begin showing its age here in a year or two, especially with Starlink and 5G.
