EE's still got a few more months to itself before the mass 4G rollout by other mobile telecoms providers kicks in, and another source of revenue for the company's coffers in this captive market is the mobile Wi-Fi hotspot.
EE supplied Computing with Alcatel's Onetouch Link Y800 device and a 4G LTE SIM card. We subjected it to a number of technical tests, not to mention a careful consideration of the device's actual use case in practice.
To get right down to the nitty gritty, we had surprisingly few problems with the 4G connection itself, and it lived up to its promise of being able to "connect up to 10 devices".
4G still doesn't have the greatest reputation for cut-outs and network logjams, especially in the centre of London, but in both the second floor office of our Soho premises and out in the middle of sunny, tree-lined Green Park, we received a full network signal on the device itself.
Bandwidth tests using Speedtest.net showed speeds (measured using a Google Nexus 7 as the connecting device in all cases) that were – strangely – far better inside the office than outside.
Inside the office we recorded 19.04Mbps upload speed, 18.36Mbps download speed, and a ping of 35ms.
Outside we recorded less than half that, clocking 8.4Mbps download just outside our front door, with 3.7Mbps at upload.
Two subsequent tests delivered similar results.
Still, in actual use the difference was less noticeable, and we managed to connect four devices to the network running HD YouTube content both outside and inside the office.
There were, however, long buffering times on YouTube no matter how many devices we connected, but video played unimpeded once buffering was done.
In terms of providing a steady, relatively fast connection to get day-to-day journalism tasks (multiple tab web browsing, short streaming video clips and connecting to our sometimes laggy backend CMS) done, though, the Y800 proved pretty much faultless.
The use case for the Y800 can't be for using YouTube all day, anyway; the rather expensive data contracts wouldn't cover that for a start.