T-Mobile’s Coolpad Surfs Service to Rural Areas

T-Mobile announced the launch of the Coolpad Surf, a 600MHz mobile hot spot that, aside from having a super cool name, is designed to bring greatly improved coverage service to their long ignored and underserved rural areas. It’s the first mobile hot spot to support Band 71, or 600MHz LTE, which T-Mobile recently won the spectrum license for from the Federal Communications Commission Broadcast Incentive auction last April.

The Coolpad Surf has a 2,150mAh battery that can last up to 48 hours on standby and gets around five hours of use on one charge. It can be used with up to 15 devices at once, which is great news, since number of phones have been released with Band 71 support since last spring, including the iPhone XS and XR, Samsung Galaxy S9, and the OnePlus 6T.

In addition to support for Band 71, The Coolpad Surf also offers support for 4G LTE Bands 2, 4, and 66, and 3G Bands 1, 2, and 4. The device costs $72, and data plans start at $10 a month for 2GB of data and go up to $85 a month for 22GB of data.

The Coolpad Surf is available now on T-Mobile’s website, and the company plans to bring the hot spot to its budget brand Metro later this month, only it’ll go by the less cool name of MetroSMART Hotspot, with different pricing and data plans.

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