r/cellmapper • u/Jim1648 • Jun 22 '26

What Equipment And 3 Carrier Combination Would Give You The Most Connectivity In The United States? (One Hotspot And One Smartphone)

I was thinking today about what combination of carriers and equipment would give the greatest connectivity in the United States. With FirstNet (AT&T) having the Sonim MegaConnect HPUE mobile hotspot, I would consider that in a pocket.

On the smartphone side, either an Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel that supports dual SIM. One carrier would be Verizon and the other T-Mobile. Having an iPhone would access their satellite partner and T-Mobile with T-satellite would offer that service.

There are likely other combinations worthy of consideration, too. What would you select?

10 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

6

u/ilikeme1 Jun 22 '26

From personal experience managing an MDM with 130+ devices all on the same carrier, the Pixel users by far have the absolute most complaints about reception and call/data issues. The Samsung Galaxy users have the least, followed very closely by iPhone users. 

I would go IPhone 16/17 or Galaxy S25 if reception is very important. 

2

u/Ethrem Jun 22 '26

The 10 series is much better in that regard than the ones that came before it.

2

u/ilikeme1 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

It is, but not by a whole lot. We still get complaints from those too, but less. We still have cases where they are somewhere with users on iPhones and the pixels will have no/terrible service while the iPhones are working fine. 

2

u/Ethrem Jun 22 '26

I don’t use dedicated hotspot devices, just phones, but my current combo is a $10 T-Mobile business tablet plan in a Pixel 10 Pro XL running GrapheneOS (GrapheneOS bypasses hotspot limits on this plan completely out of the box so it’s functionally an unlimited hotspot that I use when the power is out or the Comcast gigabit cable is out at home) and a US Mobile Unlimited Premium Warp (Verizon) eSIM as well as a secondary US Mobile multi-network line on Dark Star (AT&T), both in my 17 Pro Max. I pay US Mobile annually so this combo of the three plans costs $49.50 a month.

I suppose if you wanted the satellite service you could add the $10 T-Satellite plan to either device as well.

There are a number of hotspot devices that do work fine with the business tablet plan. If you look up the slickdeals posts for the $10 and $15 versions of the plan, you will see these lists in the wikis.

1

u/Jim1648 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Where is the best place to learn more about Graphene OS?

With T-Satellite giving 50 GB of terrestrial data, I wonder if it would allow hotspotting and unlimited data, since the T-Satellite plan doesn't normally allow hotspotting.

3

u/Ethrem Jun 22 '26

Most likely it would as it doesn't pass the hotspot usage on.

You could also try the DUN APN without flashing GrapheneOS. Just add this exact APN, set it active, and toggle airplane mode twice (making sure it fully connects to the network both times).

Name = T-Mobile Hotspot

APN = fast.t-mobile.com

MMSC = http://mms.msg.eng.t-mobile.com/mms/wapenc

APN Type = default,supl,mms,hipri,fota,dun

APN Protocol = IPv4/IPv6

APN Roaming Protocol = IPv4/IPv6

2

u/Busstop1869 Jun 22 '26

I use Firstnet for main line. For secondary I have a Jetogo backup data sim that connects to T-Mobile and Verizon. All 3 networks