Opinion Pole

Dongle.  It is a funny little word that is difficult to say out loud without cracking a smile – try it. 

If you want to see a few videos of people having fun with the word “dongle” click here, here or here.  If you do not know what a dongle is then click here – don’t worry, it is safe. 

I recently purchased my first dongle from Verizon Wireless and it has my attention.  It is a 4G LTE dongle manufactured by LG and I love it!  Verizon is claiming data speeds of 5-12mbps on the downlink and 2-5mbps on the uplink.  Actually I have no idea what that means, but I will say that I cannot tell the difference between it and the wired network in my office.  That is fast enough for me.  My dongle will not be the last 4G LTE device that I purchase – I can’t wait for a phone, tablet, or the numerous embedded devices that this is sure to lead to in a 4G world.

The monthly cost of my dongle is about the same as Wi-Fi in a hotel room for a few nights a month and it is much more portable.  In addition to hotel rooms, I use it in coffee shops, airports, client offices, and I even used it to send three large .pptx files on a Southwest flight where I stopped but did not change planes – the “in-flight Wi-Fi” was too slow for those files.  Previously those .pptx files would not have been received by my client until I got to my hotel that night well after the close of business. 

The 4G dongle is the next step in a smaller, faster, fully connected, wireless world. In short, it has shown me that 4G will be a major game changer for wireless industry.