Which is a shame because the Nighthawk is a very good Wi-Fi device, versatile and easy to carry around, and perfectly capable of giving most people what they want in a portable hotspot without the added hype and expectations of “5G Evolution.”īut that’s with one very big caveat: like any hotspot, it’s subject to the variables of wireless life. If you charged admission for people to attend an advance screening of “The Last Jedi” but showed the audience a slightly enhanced version of 2015’s “The Force Awakens” with the title scratched out and replaced with “The Last Jedi (Evolution),” you’d have some very upset “Star Wars” fans. You might get mad and throw this thing across the room it certainly is shaped in a way that invites doing that.ĪT&T’s perhaps-too-aggressive marketing - putting the phrase “5G” anywhere near this thing - feels like a mistake. You’re going to have unrealistic expectations. 5G is a standard that’s still being worked on, and if you begin to believe that buying a Nighthawk means you’ll be accessing a next-generation 5G network that will give you a jump in speed comparable to when 3G networks gave way to 4G, you’re going to be very disappointed. Got all that? AT&T is using a variety of hardware and software techniques to squeeze more bandwidth out of its existing 4G LTE network and calling that “5G Evolution.”īut it’s not actually 5G.

This denser, more advanced network enables the current evolution toward 5G. Small Cells are engineered to operate with the macro network to add coverage and capacity wherever it is needed Small cells inherently have Self Organizing Network (SON) capabilities built into the software which allow them to automatically adjust to their surroundings.”

And that’s where things get interesting with the Nighthawk, especially if you live in Austin.Īustin is one of two cities (the other is Indianapolis) where AT&T is rolling out what it calls “5G Evolution,” a way to double LTE speeds by making the network denser with what it calls “Small cells” and by using software that adjusts to its surroundings.įrom AT&T: “. we continue to invest in upgrading our wireless network by adding small cells and using advanced technologies like carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO, 256 QAM and layering on LTE-LAA capabilities. To do this, the Nighthawk uses AT&T’s 4G LTE network, accessing those streams of Internet to share with its connected clients.

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