Nighthawk® 5G Mobile Hotspot -- Spec Sheet

[JSchnee21]

Perhaps others have seen it already, but here is the official spec sheet for the:

Nighthawk® 5G Mobile Hotspot

Data Sheet | MR5000-1A1NAS

https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/mobile/MR5000.pdf

[JSchnee21]

Wait, hold the phone . . . (pun intended)

No Ethernet?!?!  Just USB-C are you serious?  Please tell me they just forgot to list it.

And only one?!?!  5GHz radio?  So when you're getting "5G" (not 5GE and not 5G+) -- aka LAA -- and you cannot use the USB-C or the 5GHz 802.11ac, what are you supposed to do?

And I should have the privledge of paying $500 for this?

[JSchnee21]

Here's the FCC ID

Goggle this

PY318300428 FCC 

Go to the second link which starts "https://apps.fcc.gov/blah/blah"

Most of the info is still confidential.  But I see no Ethernet port.

[nhantenna]

1) No external antenna ports?

2) No low band 5G?

3) 5 band aggegration with only 4 internal antennas?

[JSchnee21]

Most likely the one of the 5 band aggregation bands are either "intra-band" or LAA (and thus using the Wifi antenna)

I'm not surprised there are no external antenna ports.  This is becoming more and more un-manageable given LTE MIMO.  Let alone mmWave -- for which there is no consumer/prosumer hardware.

I would expect that the Qualcomm X50 chipset should support sub-6GHz 5G.  Presumably the same antennas would be used as for LTE?  Whether or not it gets enabled is another question.

I strongly expect this to be a short lived "Gen 1" product.  I'm curious to see who the OEM is for the Verizon product.  Their hotspots are generally more fully baked.

[Blanca_O]

Hi All, 

Let me verify this with the team. We will let you know for any updates.

Regards, 
Blanca 
Community Team

[ErnestTheGreat]

@nhantenna  The datasheet does not list Ethernet port or external antenna ports because they are not supported. The sub-60GHz 5G band and 5 CA is supported. If you are looking for more info on AT&T 5G network I would check or post the questions on AT&T community forum as well. 

[JSchnee21]

Hi @ErnestTheGreat,

THANK YOU to you and Bianca for taking the time to respond to our posts!!!  But, many of use here feel that Netgear and AT&T are really missing the mark when it comes to soliciting and listening to customer feedback on your combined LTE Hotspot product efforts.

We were so excited when we found out that the MR1100 from Australia was coming to the USA in the Fall of 2017.  Regrettably the promise of that product never came to fruition and its deployment and support by Netgear and AT&T has been badly bungled.  Not to mention the silent product revision adding Band 14 just a few months after launch, and all of the battery charging, thermal, and product stability issues.

Now, a new, even more expensive product with even less usable capability is being promised / launched, when so many issues with the existing MR1100 have yet to be addressed.  And now will likely never be addressed as resources and focus are siphoned off and put towards the new product.

The reality is that LTE-A on the existing MR1100 does not work well.  As I have indicated in numerous posts on this board, it's throughput is generally only half that of my iPhone in the same locations.  There is no LTE band selection / preference capability, No 5GHz Wifi if you're using LAA, no touch screen, poor wifi range, only two external antenna connections, a variety of battery charging, premature failure, and thermal limit issues, just to name a few of the main issues.

The reality of the matter, despite what AT&T is selling in the 5G blitz, is that LTE-A (e.g. CAT16 with 256QAM, 4x4 MIMO, and 3x & 4x CA) is what will be providing the majority of internet data to the majority (>95%) of mobile broadband subscribers.  There's a huge new market of rural broadband customers (myself excluded -- I have FIOS) who depend on the MR1100 for their home internet.  This device has been a Godsend to them but it could be so much better.

All you have to do is look at the performance of both the Australian and especially European versions of the MR1100 to understand the potential this product has.  In these contries, their version of this product routinely posts 200-400 Mbit download speeds and 50-100Mbit upload speeds over LTE-A (in Scandinavia especially).  At first I thought it was just AT&T's network that was the issue.  But after seeing what my iPhone XS Max can do (for downloads at least), there's very clearly an issue with the MR1100.  Looking at the FCC filings, it appears that the unit is limited to only using up to QAM16 just to name one potential issue.

Without a doubt, the MR1100 is one of the best hotspots to be released for AT&T in recent memory.  But in terms of delivering on the promised specifications it is no where near.  Now the shiny new product is released -- and I had planned to buy it -- not for 5G -- but to hopefull get a device for 4G LTE-A that actually worked.  But given the lack of an Ethernet port and external antenna connections, the continued inability to use 5.8GHz Wifi tethering when LAA is in use, the outrageous $500 price tag, and the expectation that this rushed to marken Gen1 product will yet again be replaced by a newer Gen2 model in 6 months or less (silently again?) -- I just cannot put myself through the abuse.

I'd just like my MR1100 to work properly, please.  And get the same or better speeds that my iPhone which has an "inferior" Intel baseband modem.  Of course, the MR1100 does have much better RF sensitivity than my iPhone.

-Jonathan

[nhantenna]

@JSchnee21 wrote: "But after seeing what my iPhone XS Max can do (for downloads at least), there's very clearly an issue with the MR1100."

@ErnestTheGreat @Blanca_O This issue of phone vs hotspot has been brewing for a while.  Given the same AT&T 5G Evolution network, a user holding a Netgear 5G Evolution Hotspot in left hand and an iPhone XS Max in right hand, should there be a download difference?  1% difference? 10% difference? 50% difference?  Secondly, does the iPhone XS Max have "AT&T 5G Evolution" capabilities that the Netgear hotspot does not?

@JSchnee21 Any youtubes out there (yours or other peoples) that illustrate this issue for Netgear engineers to reference?

My understanding here is we thought our Netgear 5G Evolution hotspots were working the best they could out of the box on AT&Ts network.  But flash forward a few months and now users have 5G Evolution capable phones (like the iPhone XS Max) that are outperforming the Netgear 5G Evolution hotspots by a considerable margin, enough for users to think the Netgear might have a software and/or hardware issue.

[nhantenna]

@ErnestTheGreat @Blanca_O @JSchnee21

I am following up on my 2019-01-04 06:35 PM post.