Huawei Mobile WiFi E5577 (Optus)

A more useful than expected device – These types of modems have been around for some years but I recently had cause to buy one. There were two motivations; 1. I live in an area where due to topography the Telstra mobile data signal is unreliable and I wanted to test the Optus alternative before changing the sims on any of our devices; 2. the 'smarts' on our Samsung Smart TV had quickly reached its upgrade limit so I downloaded all of our favourite internet channels onto a small laptop computer which plugs into the TV. This laptop can be used to make any home TV 'Smart' and when traveling on holiday it is easy to take and it plug into any available TV. Often however, the 'in-house' WiFi is inadequate for streaming or lacks security so I thought the Optus modem could be the answer. The modem has proved to be fully capable of streaming HD movies with little if any buffering and it is capable of running all of our WiFi dependent devices such as tablets and laptops. A further unexpected use of the portable modem which has its own battery lasting around six hours is that living in a rural area we experience fairly frequent planned power outages and our broadband WiFi goes down within an hour or two so the portable modem provides back-up for tablet or laptop use during these times. The Optus portable modem came with a sim card pre-loaded with 50 giga-bytes of data and reloads of 80 giga-bytes lasting up to 12 months are available at around $130.00. The setup and tuning into any WiFi dependent device was quite simple and so far we have experienced no drop-outs. It is small and very easy to carry in a pocket, purse or pack. A very useful item which can be used simultaneously by several devices which has obviated the need for expensive sim cards in a number of devices.

Very reliable – I purchased this last year when our NBN was down. Now I using it continuously for home / work and it's been great. Only issue was the interface is a bit hard to work out when setting up.