Samsung SCH-LC11 4G Mobile Hotspot (Verizon Wireless) - Get the Best Deals of Cell Phones with and without Plans

This is a great little solution for so many uses! Great speed and good short term reliability, although it is important to realize that every location is unique. Plan to test it in your area to be certain your 4G reception is solid. I live in a rural area with no good DSL availability, but the Verizon 4G signal is solid.

Samsung did a great job on the device, and it solves some real needs. However, people may be looking for a 12 or even 24 hour 4G solution (like those of us in rural areas!) may want to realize the service is not fully continous/stable.

Over two days I tested the system for twelve hours straight, running a business level VPN, and although it had a couple brief service gaps that caused my VPN to drop (the VPN was easily restarted), it mostly held up. On one occaision I had to restart the hotspot (it had signal but no internet traffic). The restart restored service quickly.

I have heard of some people having an incompatible VPN, but mine worked fine. Webex and email, as well as file share access was all very good, with excellent performance (other than the two VPN drops).

The other problem/limitation occurs when you use the device for an extended period of time – it turns itself off. What appears to happen is the charging rate (with a 110v adapter) appears to be less than the consumption rate, so it slowly drags down the battery. I am turning the system off at night, giving the battery time to charge, then it runs for a day while plugged into power. After eight or ten hours you risk it reducing signal power and turning off.

This means a full time operation is not possible, and makes 12 hour availability problematic, but workable.

All of the above is after four days of testing. So, I continue to look for ways to make this very good device a bit more reliable in a continous use environment.

Every location is unique. Plan to test it in your area!

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This may change as more people join Verizon’s LTE(4G) Network. But as of this morning(04-04-11), in Emeryville, CA I received the following speed test results:

17.94Mb/s Download
12.56Mb/s Upload
43ms Ping

WOW! is right.

Verizon, is way a head of the game in the East Bay. As you can see I am getting faster speeds than many people even get on their home networks. Remarkable. I recommend going into the Verizon store in your area and do a Speed Test on one of their set up machines. This will give you an idea of what to expect in that area.

Only con I have noticed with the device, so far, is that when additional WIFI devices connect to the hotspot it occasionally drops the connection on one of the devices, causing me to have to reconnect. Other than that, the battery life seems reliable, though I have not clocked it yet.

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By 

R. Grossman “Fixing the world…” (USA) –

  

This hotspot is really fast – I’ve gotten 17 down and 14 up driving in my car!

I bought both Verizon 4G hotspots – Samsung and Novatel – and I also had the the previous Novatel 2200 mi-fi.

The Samsung is the true successor to the Novatel 3G mi-fi, carrying on the tradition of the Novatel’s form factor, while Novatel has incredibly veered off course with their 4G hotspot which is nothing like their previous model.

The Samsung form factor is way better than the Novatel 4G hotspot, which is dreadful. The new Novatel is not at all like the previous Novatel mi-fi. It’s bigger than the Samsung, has a cheesy chrome bezel, and little feet – showing that they designed it as a very small table-top router. The Samsung has a nice soft-touch matte plastic case, and is smaller than a deck of playing cards – it’s like a stack of credit cards in size.

The Samsung is much more similar to the previous 3G Novatel mifi in size and form. The Samsung works great in a pocket or in the sunglasses pocket on the inside roof of your car or under the visors. Also, it has LED’s for on/off/low-battery, 4G, 3G, and network activity. The Novatel eInk paper display sounds good in reviews but it is very dull, hard to see, and ugly.

You can set the Samsung to sleep after not being used for a period of time (like 30 minutes) to save battery, or you can set it to never sleep.

You can safely ignore the negative reviews, which are entirely attributable a combo of the first firmware version, customers who have never used a mobile hotspot, battery-save 30-minute shutdown (which can be turned off), and also Verizon 4G is still in its early implementation phase and is occasionally off-line or slow, although those problems are slowly becoming much less frequent.

Early online mag reviewers made a big deal over the Novatel having a battery indicator, but it only has 3 bars, is almost invisible, and the Samsung does warn you on low battery when the green on-button turns red.

The Samsung charger is small and portable, the Novatel charger is the typical big clunker. The Samsung USB-A to USB-micro-B cable plugs into your computer OR into the wall plug, and will charge from either. The Novatel will NOT function as a wireless hotspot while plugged into a computer.

The Samsung has one flaw – the browser interface does not contain an option to save the router’s configuration as a file to your pc, whereas the Novatel has it.

PS: I’m finishing up a small and completely free iPhone app that checks the Samsung charger status – it should be in the app store early July 2011, so if you have an iPhone search for “HotSpot Sam”.

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