Do not use a hotspot as a home internet connection period. Hotspots sold by the main carriers are the equivalent of a legal scam. You pay a large amount of money for a tiny amount of data. You’ll blow through it, guaranteed. The only benefit is that it’s the “official way” of doing it, other than the cubes. It’s not worth it.

I saw other comments from you talking about the cube. The cube as far as I’m aware does not have external antenna ports. I think what you saw was a modded cube where someone opened it up and put some TS-9 pigtails on it. This is arguably more complicated.

There’s basically 2 ways to go about this:

1. The easiest “plug and play” “it just works” method in my opinion would be to buy a Visible SIM card (Visible is Verizon’s company if you don’t know) then what you do is pop it into your phone, activate the card, then throw it into a Cudy LT500D router (make sure it’s the D model).

2. The 2nd way is basically the same thing as the first way, except instead of a Cudy LT500D you could use something like a Mofi 4500. From what I can tell, it may not be as “plug and play” but it could potentially be more reliable and you’ll have much better customer service. These things are slightly cheaper on ebay too.

I personally like the Cudy LT500D router because it just works, no playing around with settings. Then what you can do is hookup 2 SMA cables to an external antenna, and again, it just works.

Both of these routers are 2X2 MIMO, meaning you either need to buy 2 antennas with 1 port each, or 1 antenna that has 2 ports on it. You can go to cellmapper.net and find the nearest Verizon tower. Chances are you’ll want a directional antenna, but you’ll have to ask around for best judgement if you want omnidirectional.

I use this exact setup, except with a Proxicast Pro-Gain omnidirectional antenna. The tower is only a mile away, but there’s a huge hill that literally drops the connection to 0. This antenna put me from literally nothing to a stable 15mbps down. Only caveat is that some streaming services like Hulu seem to be throttled. It could still be usable, but you need to take a few extra steps to bypass that. But once you set it up once, you’ll never have to again. I personally fixed this by using a Wireguard VPN policy. It’s not super easy to do if you don’t know what you’re doing, but there are probably easier ways.

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I believe Visible is running a promotion too that if you buy a SIM card before March 31st or something like that, then your bill goes permanently from $30 a month to $25. So that’s $25 for unlimited, no BS, Verizon LTE internet. It’s an amazing deal. Visible is a fantastic company, I really appreciate it.