Getting a laptop online, wherever you are.

What our phone plans include today

Mobile hotspot — tethering a laptop to your phone's cellular data — is not included on our phone plans right now. We would rather say that plainly than bury it in a footnote: the plan pages list it as not included, and nothing on this site will tell you otherwise.

What every plan does include is unlimited talk and text, high-speed data on the phone itself, and reduced-speed data instead of an overage bill once the allowance is used. If sharing a connection is the point, the two routes below are the ones that actually work.

The router route: Mac5G

A dedicated 5G router does what a phone hotspot pretends to do, without flattening the phone's battery: its own data line, a real antenna, Wi-Fi for everyone in the building and an Ethernet port for the things that need one.

• Mac5G Home 100 — internet service — $145.99 a month. Unlimited home or business internet, qualified at your address first, router included in the plan. See the internet plans →
• Katalyst Spark K500A 5G Business Router — $499.00. A serious 5G router for offices, pop-ups, events, remote teams, and households with a lot of connected gear.
• Katalyst Kadet K300NB 5G Business Router — $469.00. A high-capacity fixed-location 5G router for shops, offices, healthcare practices, and busy workspaces.
• Katalyst Sidekick Wi-Fi 6 Range Extender — $269.99. Plug in, sync, and stretch strong Wi-Fi farther across larger homes, multi-floor spaces, and small businesses.
• Mac5G Router Rental — $14.99 a month, if you would rather not buy the hardware outright.

For a truck, a trailer, a pop-up shop or a job site, the same router runs off an inverter or a battery and gives the crew Wi-Fi without anyone tethering to anything.

Which one you actually need

1. One laptop, once in a while, at a coffee shop. Use the shop's Wi-Fi with a little care — see the cybercrime guide — or ask us about a data-only line for the laptop itself.
2. A house, an apartment or a shop that needs internet every day. Mac5G Internet, qualified at the address, router in the plan.
3. A crew that moves — vans, sites, events. A Spark or Kadet router plus a Mac5G data line, and the Beacon antenna if the signal indoors is thin.
4. Cameras, sensors, a card terminal. That is Mac IoT: its own data SIM per device, so a camera never depends on somebody's phone. IoT data SIMs →

Getting a good signal out of a fixed-wireless router

• Put the router by a window, high up, and on the side of the building facing open sky rather than a hill.
• Keep it away from microwaves, thick masonry, metal shelving and mirrored glass.
• Check the signal readout after every move — a metre can change it more than a floor.
• Use the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band for devices in the same room and 2.4 GHz for the far corners of the house.
• Run a wire to the television, the desktop or the point-of-sale terminal; leave Wi-Fi for things that move.
• If the whole house cannot be covered, add the Sidekick extender rather than turning the router's power up.

Questions