Traveling to Hungary? This is how I got online on the cheap

[Lacoste]

The last couple of weeks, my family and I have been vacationing in Hungary. We’d booked accomodations with wifi, and we hadn’t brought any travel info with us, confident that we’d be able to use Tripadvisor, Foursquare, etc to find nice places to visit. Unfortunately, the wifi at our first vacation home turned out to be broken. This meant we had to improvise, and after a bit of shopping, I got a killer deal on a mobile 4G hotspot. So I thought I’s post it here.

Meet the Alcatel W800

I’de never seen a mobile 4G router disguised as a USB stick before, but the Alcatel W800 isn’t simply a 4G modem dongle. It’s a complete router, and the USB connector is there mostly to supply power. There’s no need to plug it into a computer. Once powered up, it’ll connect to the 4G network, and broadcast a wifi network for up to ten devices. You can log into the W800 to modify the network name, password, etc, just like any other router.

T-mobile (aka “Telekom”)
The T-Mobile store in Siofok, near Lake Balaton, offered this device – complete with a prepaid SIM card – for only HUF 9950. That’s roughly 32 euro, and it came with 1 GB of data. The Hungarian language is unique, so it turned out to be a challenge to add more credit once the first gigabyte expired. If you can find an employee that speaks English, I’m sure there are excellent deals. I added around ten euros of prepaid credit, and it lasted the remainder of our vacation. Credit info is sent to the device as text messages, but Google Translate couldn’t make any sense of those.

Using this curious little stick
Unlike regular “mifi” routers, the W800 does not have a built-in battery. We ran it off a power bank that we happened to have with us, and it worked great. The 8800 mAh portable battery gave us 3-4 “work” days of moderate wifi usage. The device we got was locked to the Hungarian T-Mobile network, which means it won’t work anywhere else in the world, not even on other T-Mobile networks. Fortunately, unlock code for the W800 are available on eBay, and I can confirm that they work.

Reception
4G works really well in urban areas, and I got excellent speeds. When touring the countryside, I found that speeds would drop dramatically. The W800 does of course also support 3G, but it seemed that mostly only Edge was available. Still, I think this was an great deal, and it helped us enjoy the beautiful country that is Hungary even more.

Edited October 5, 2015 by Lacoste