In anticipation for starting my new job that involves 100% remote work, one of the items that has been on my checklist for a while has been to get a mobile/pocket wifi device & plan for personal use when I decide to work away from home. To have to always rely on cafe hotspots, or coworking spaces for internet that may provide decent (at best) to shotty connections is — to put it bluntly — a pain in the ass.

Over the weekend, my wife and I went to the SoftBank shop to renew our cellphone contracts, but instead of going with our current plan, we decided to switch over to Y!mobile (a subsidiary company of SoftBank). This little move cut our phone bill in half — yay!

During that time, we also looked at the mobile wifi options, and the recommended device was to go with the 603HW HUAWEI.

PocketWiFi Lock Screen

PocketWiFi Main Menu

It’s a sleek little device smaller than the height of my iPhone, but maybe twice as thick. It can supposedly support up to 612Mbps of download speeds, and can have up to 14 simultaneous connected devices. This is actually great news since I have a team meetup coming up in the summer, and with ten members coming to Japan from other countries, one of our primary concerns has been internet. Everyone can now just relax and fall back on this WiFi if there’s simply no reliable internet.

That said, I’ve been using this device for about a few days and web browsing, downloading, and video streaming have all been snappy. Love it.

I did a speed test via Ookla’s speedtest.net, and according to those results my download speed came in at 16.20Mbps — no complaints here. For curiosity’s sake, I fired up a torrent and got speeds up to 500-600kbps for a 5.5gb file. But in this case, I think the speed for torrents will be highly dependent on the number of seeds there are, since I know I was able to reach around 2Mbps from a previous mobile wifi device I used to use.

Now, with location independent wifi allowing me to work anywhere in Sapporo without worrying about internet, expect a lot more posts on cafe reviews other than Starbucks 🙂