Telstra Ultimate Wi-Fi review: Telstra Ultimate Wi-Fi

Design

Telstra's previous wireless hotspots — the inventively named Telstra Prepaid Mobile Broadband Hotspot and Telstra Elite Mobile Wi-Fi looked broadly similar, offering up incremental technology upgrades within the same shell. You could tell they were hotspots, because they looked like them.

9.3

Telstra Ultimate Wi-Fi

The Good

Good data throughput. Easily read screen.

The Bad

Gets hot. Default set-up is perhaps too secure to be easily functional Very chatty for a hotspot.

The Bottom Line

Telstra's Ultimate Wi-Fi hotspot delivers solid mobile data to up to five devices and comes highly recommended — as long as you can afford it.

The Ultimate Wi-Fi hotspot doesn't. Without being powered on, it looks rather like one of those cheap bargain store portable games consoles that come with 30 different versions of Tetris on them. Where the Prepaid Hotspot lacked a screen and the Elite introduced a small display, the Ultimate ups the stakes with a larger multi-line display that includes signal strength, current Wi-Fi SSID and, by user choice, the current password for the network. The idea there is that you can easily show folks what the password is without having to write it down or read it aloud.

Features

The Ultimate Wi-Fi shares technology with Telstra's other Ultimate product, the Ultimate USB Modem, in that it's a Dual-Carrier HSPA-capable device, which gives it a theoretical maximum of 42Mbps throughput speed. In the real world you're not likely to get that kind of speed, and even Telstra rates it for "between" 1-20Mbps in Dual-Carrier HSPA (DC-HSPA) areas; outside those areas you'll typically see between 550Kbps-8Mbps. As with all things wireless, variability is the name of the game.

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The Hotspot itself can work as a USB tethered modem, but most folks will take advantage of its ability to pair up to five devices across an 802.11n network instead. Telstra rates the standard 1800mAh battery in the Ultimate Wi-Fi as good for up to four hours of connected use. Those who need additional power could invest in the optional AU$79 battery pack, which ups that to eight hours of claimed uptime.

As with Telstra's other hotspots, it's a little confusing working out which SIMs will or won't work in the Ultimate Wi-Fi hotspot. Telstra supplied us with a unit for testing alongside a business SIM (the consumer Ultimate Hotspot will come later), which works on a post-paid basis. The previous prepaid hotspots wouldn't work with post-paid consumer SIMs, but they would work with post-paid business SIMs. It seems as though Telstra likes you a little more if you're in a suit, essentially.

At the time of writing we're still waiting on exact clarification on which Telstra and BigPond SIMs will or won't work with the Ultimate Wi-Fi; in the meantime we'd advise checking carefully when purchasing to make sure it'll work with your SIM. Naturally, if you take a 24-month contract option, that won't be a concern at all, as it'll come with its own SIM.

Performance

Setting up the Ultimate Wi-Fi was a little more tricky than we've seen with other Telstra Hotspots, although that may have been a quirk of the unit Telstra supplied us with. The post-paid SIM had a PIN lock on it, so in order to set it up, we had to charge the unit, power it up, connect to it, log into its web interface to enter the PIN before we could do any surfing. This was set as the default, making it less pick-up-and-go than we'd typically like to see from a hotspot, although you can change this. You can also change whether it'll display the SSID password on the main screen, depending on your security tastes.

The Ultimate Wi-Fi has one oddity we've not seen on a hotspot before — it's noisy. An in-built tiny speaker chirps when the unit powers up, and again each and every time a device connects or disconnects from the hotspot. Again, it's user configurable if you don't happen to want a hotspot that sounds like R2-D2 on a drug trip.

The Ultimate Wi-Fi's best performance should come in an area blanketed by DC-HSPA coverage, so we at first tested using the Speedtest.net web application in Sydney's CBD with both the Ultimate Wi-Fi and its predecessor, the Elite Wi-Fi. The Elite Wi-Fi will, for the moment, remain Telstra's offering for its prepaid customers, and we were curious to see if there was a real-world difference between the devices in usage.

Our Sydney CBD figures showed that difference well, with the Ultimate averaging 6.424Mbps down and 1.35Mbps up to the Elite's 5.56Mbps down and 1.28Mbps up. That's not as huge a difference as we'd hoped to see, so we took our testing further afield, by testing in Sydney, Ryde and Hornsby, and then heading off on a road trip to test in Wagga Wagga in regional NSW and Glenelg in Adelaide, South Australia.

Telstra Ultimate Wi-Fi

Telstra Elite Wi-Fi

The wider test figures do show the Ultimate Wi-Fi performing well against its brethren, and better than anything else we've ever tested. Bear in mind these are averaged figures as well; one of our Glenelg tests gave us an impressive 21.68Mbps download figure. Equally, our very low Wagga Wagga test scores were in a residential house that we knew upfront got very poor mobile signals from every carrier, because there's merit in giving a tough test every now and again.

As with all things wireless, variability is still a key factor; you may get better than most current fixed ADSL2+ offerings, but equally you may get worse figures. Uploads are still relatively sedate and for gamers and those requiring low latency, ping figures are still on the high side.

In battery life terms, we averaged around three hours in our tests with multiple connected devices. It wouldn't be enough to go an entire day without the add-on battery, but it's broadly comparable with other competing devices. Like any other battery-powered enclosed device, it can also end up a little warm over time if you're carrying it in your pocket while testing.

Conclusion

The Ultimate Wi-Fi is the fastest hotspot we've tested to date, but as with all things Telstra, there's a premium price tag attached. If you need the speed and network access offered and can cover the ongoing data costs, it's a very worthy buy.