XCom Global Opens NYC Service Center

Saturday, May 12, 2012

XCom Global, the leading provider of international mobile broadband access, announced it has opened an in-person service counter in midtown Manhattan, right near the Grand Central Station train terminal. Located at the offices of Amnet travel services, 286 Madison Avenue (between 40th and 41st street) Suite 1700, the XCom desk will allow customers to pick up international MiFi kits before they travel to any of 195 countries or drop them off upon return.

The Difficulty of Buying Broadband on Your Trip

This past February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we had a chance to put the company’s service to the test. XCom Global provided us with three demo MiFi units that we picked up in Spain, though regular customers would have received them before departing on their trips. Because we didn’t get our units until the evening of our second day, we spent our first day learning just how difficult it can be to purchase reliable mobile broadband service from local providers on one’s own.

Before we left on our trip, we decided that we would purchase local prepaid SIM cards and packed a couple of unlocked GSM-capable phones. After we landed in the Barcelona airport, we looked around for a phone store, but couldn’t find one in the airport. After checking in to our hotel, we walked over to a local mall and found a department store selling prepaid SIMs from four different carriers. Staff Writer Sarah Silbert is fluent in Spanish and was able to talk to the clerk and help us select a 9-Euro prepaid plan from the Orange network.

Testing the Service

XCom Global’s MiFi comes in a convenient carrying case, which has a USB cable, a spare battery, an AC adapter with a variety of plug adapters and an instruction booklet. After consulting the instructions, we were up and running with the MiFi and pleasantly surprised to see that the primary battery came fully charged, something XCom told us it provides for all its customers.

Throughout the next four days of our trip, our MiFis proved invaluable in areas where Wi-Fi was unattainable such as restaurants, buses and the convention floor. Even in our hotel rooms, the MiFi was sometimes more reliable than the hotel’s own Wi-Fi connection.

Though theoretical tests on Speedtest.net only showed rates in the 1 to 2 Mbps range, in practice, we were able to upload video files with great alacrity. On several occasions, we were able to publish 15o t0 200MB videos to YouTube in around 20 minutes, far better than the 45 minutes to an hour we’d expect from 3G, but not as good as the two to five minute times we got from the speedy connection in the press room.

Because the MiFi can support up to five devices at once, we were able to use it not only on our laptops, but also on our smartphones. So even though we were unable to get a working SIM card for one of our Android handsets, we were able to keep it tethered to the MiFi that sat in our bag and use it to check email and surf the Web as if it were directly connected to 3G.

The single status light on the Novatel-made unit was extremely confusing, flashing between green, purple, blue and red colors which were hard to interpret despite the very detailed provided instruction manual. We wish the device had some sort of LCD display to tell us what kind of signal it had, how much battery was left and whether it was really on or off.

Video credit : http://blog.laptopmag.com

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