Alcatel Linkzone 2 (T-Mobile) – Review 2020
Imagine your mobile carrier only offered low-end smartphones. You’d consider that to be a failing, right? But that’s what T-Mobile is doing with hotspots. The Alcatel LinkZone 2 is a low-end hotspot that performs as well as you’d expect from its $90 price. It doesn’t show off T-Mobile’s rapidly expanding network particularly well, nor does it work better than using a premium smartphone as a hotspot. In a richer lineup, it would be a good low-end choice for people who can’t afford or don’t need more. It’s just frustrating that this is essentially T-Mobile’s only choice.
Plans and Features
Yes, your phone has a hotspot mode, but there are still reasons to get a dedicated hotspot. For business use, a hotspot line can be billed separately, which many businesses require. They support more devices at once than your phone does. You can leave them plugged in and running when you take your phone with you somewhere. Dedicated hotspots don’t drain your phone’s battery. They usually last all day, which your phone won’t do in hotspot mode. The best hotspots also have external antenna ports, to improve signal in rural areas. (This one doesn’t.)
The hotspot charges and connects with USB-C
T-Mobile’s service plans run from $20 per month for 2GB to $95 per month for 22GB. So the company’s hotspots aren’t sufficient for primary home internet access, as Comcast says the median usage in American homes is 220GB per month. These plans are also a step backward after Sprint’s hotspot plans, which allow 100GB of usage for $60/month.
The LinkZone 2 is a little plastic brick with some small blue indicator lights on the front. It measures 2.6 by 4.1 by 0.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.2 ounces. There’s a single light to show that Wi-Fi is on; three lights showing signal strength; three for battery capacity; and one to show if there are any SMS messages. There’s a power button and a WPS connection button on the back.
The hotspot has USB-C and USB-A ports. The USB-C ports can be used to connect the LinkZone to a PC as a USB modem; the USB-A port is for charging additional devices off of the hotspot’s removable 4,400mAh battery. There’s no external antenna port, so if you’re looking for a hotspot to use for home internet with a larger antenna, you’re out of luck.
You configure the hotspot from a web interface
With no external display, the device is configured entirely from a web interface. Options include blocking devices by MAC, IP filtering, port forwarding, UPNP, and manual DNS. Oddly, you have to set it to 2.4GHz 802.11n or 5GHz 802.11ac—you can’t have both. There is no option for a guest network, and no built-in speed testing or parental controls. It’s really basic.
Slow Internet on a Fast Network
T-Mobile’s network has improved by leaps and bounds with time. The company has spent the past year promoting its nationwide 5G network, and over the past few years it has developed more ways to bond together 4G channels for better speeds. This hotspot can’t access any of that.
The LinkZone 2 uses a Qualcomm MDM9207 chipset, the company’s absolute lowest-end 4G product that supports only LTE Category 4. The MDM9207 can only do 2x10MHz or 1x20MHz carrier aggregation and 64QAM encoding on download, and a single 20MHz carrier on upload. Although it supports most of T-Mobile’s LTE bands (2/4/5/12/25/26/66/71), this means it can’t tap into all of the lanes of 4G that T-Mobile generally makes available now.
For instance, here at my home in New York City, 5G Samsung and OnePlus phones connect to 10MHz of band 2; 20MHz of band 66; and 10MHz of 5G band n71. In 4G-only mode, they connect to 15MHz of band 71; 20MHz of band 4; and 10MHz of band 2. The LinkZone 2 can’t touch that. It probably picks the single band with 20MHz and sticks to it.
The result, in my testing, was that the hotspot topped out at about 30Mbps when T-Mobile’s network was capable of much more. With a OnePlus 8 Pro phone locked to 4G-only mode in the same location at the same time, I was getting 59Mbps. With that phone in 5G mode, I was getting an average of 70Mbps. (The 5G network gets higher speeds on slightly less bandwidth because it is less congested.)
That speed difference continues at a distance, too. At a distance of 30 feet, plus a thick wall, the LinkZone 2 only showed 2.79Mbps on a 2.4GHz network. The OnePlus phone showed 9.6Mbps. (The LinkZone 2 showed 21Mbps on 5GHz Wi-Fi, where the OnePlus phone’s transmitter wasn’t strong enough to make the 5GHz network reach the distance.)
There was much less difference in uplink speeds. The LinkZone showed uplink speeds from 20 to 30Mbps, while the OnePlus showed uplink speeds more on the 30Mbps side of that range. Going to 30 feet through a wall lowered uplink speeds to around 12Mbps.
Battery life on the 4,400mAh cell, on the other hand, was terrific, at 16 hours, 55 minutes of streaming. This is a more than all-day hotspot, and you can safely use it to give a top-up to your phone through the USB-A port.
Conclusions
T-Mobile has two hotspot options. There’s this, and the Franklin T9, which costs $6 less. The Franklin hotspot has the same network performance, a slightly more convenient digital signal display, but a battery that’s half the size of this one, so if you’re going to go for a T-Mobile hotspot, go for the Alcatel LinkZone 2. That said, there’s currently no hotspot that shows T-Mobile’s network in the best light. With the carrier spreading low-band 5G nationwide and turning on 2.5GHz 5G in cities across the nation starting now, I’d like to think T-Mobile would offer solutions to let their subscribers use all the lanes on its new superhighway. The best I can say about the LinkZone 2, then, is that it’s a decent stopgap; it’s inexpensive enough that you’ll still be able to afford a better hotspot when one comes out.
Alcatel LinkZone 2 Specs
Service Provider | T-Mobile |
Wireless Specification | 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac |
Number of Devices Supported | 16 |
Battery Life | 16 hours 55 minutes |