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The problem to be solved: You have a lovely Novatel 5410L 4G Hotspot from Verizon, but the battery only lasts 4 hours. If you plug it into a computer’s USB high power port, the device automatically goes into charge only mode, and stops providing any wifi access. The steps below will walk you through how to take an ordinary and inexpensive USB cable and make it work to charge the device via USB and remain a hotspot. You may think you can buy a charge-only USB cable, but it turns out those don’t work with this device – you must short the green\/white wires together to trick the device into charging and delivering wifi at the same time. Just having a cable with no green\/white data pair does not work. Credit goes to bill-mifi at the Verizon Wireless forums<\/a> for explaining about the green\/white wire shorting idea.<\/p>\n BREAKING NEWS! Verizon put out a firmware update for the Novatel Mifi that actually fixes the problem! Here’s a link to the instructions on the Verizon Wireless website<\/a> where you can get the firmware update, it’s not the most obvious procedure in the world but it works if you follow them carefully.<\/p>\n If you’re still interested, read on!<\/p>\n Basic steps are, we’re going to cut a USB cable in half, short the green\/white wires at the micro-USB side, then reconnect the black\/red pair. Solder, Electrical tape and we’re done. I found it helpful to show my work every step of the way to Quality Control Director Steve before proceeding.<\/p>\n But first, let’s watch a short video showing the behavior of the Samsung Mifi 4G with a normal USB cable and then with the modified charge-only USB cable. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nVideo Demonstrating Why This is Necessary<\/h3>\n