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Life on the Road with 3G
david_adams writes "Since I first evaluated Sprint's new Vision "3G" high speed wireless data service in September of last year, I've had the opportunity to travel around the country, using the service to keep in touch with the world, receive all my spam, er, email, and do my work. I've used the service in hotels, restaurants, parked cars, moving cars, picnic tables, and airports, in huge cities, and in desolate stretches of interstate highway. Here are my impressions after this long term test."
The author seems puzzled by the popularity of SMS in Europe, but it's just simple economics. With most plans I've come across in England in France, it's cheaper to send an SMS than to make a 1-minute call. Rates overall are also more expensive, so getting in the habit of sending an SMS rather than making a call lowers your bills.
The other advantage is that in noisy environments like buses, subways, crowded hallways, etc. you don't have to shout over the crowd to get the message across. This keeps your neighbors from strangling you and lets you say your message once rather than repeating it 3 times.
Have you seen my stapler?
Well he says that he can get 12-18Kb/s per second on GPRS. Well thats not bad but here in the UK its just not worth doing. We are billed on a per Kb cost. To download a 1MB can pay upto US$8. Also the latency sucks so SSH over GPRS isn't the most friendly expierence in the world.
However we have just had Three lauch which should provide real 3G services. Now that should be cool. I can't wait to have to make sure my hair is neat when I answer a video call
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
3 options. The free, the limited, and the expensive-but-oso-cool option.
Free: Plug in the USB cable and make sure you have the necessary drivers and the phone set to the right setting. Typically, you're limited to 14.4k but it only uses normal airtime with NO extra charges.
Limited: You can pick a plan with either limited airtime for data or limited usage (like 40mb a month for example).
Expensive but oso cool: $99.99 a month gets you unlimited, any time of day, bandwidth at constant ~140kbps at peak time and ~170-180+kbps at offpeak hours. I've heard great things about this if you plan on using this a lot.
You'll need a phone capable of doing this. Most newer phones support it. Check Ebay for a USB cable. It shouldn't cost you more than $11 especially if you check eforcity.com
For example, my Motorola T720 is recognized as a usb modem when I plug it into my computer. Since I don't pay for any of the plans I mentioned above, I get 14.4. Still good for checking email or browsing low-graphic sites.
The official info about this kind of stuff can be found here at Verizon.
I've had the service since early November, and I will be a sad, sad little boy if they ever deactivate it or change the pricing structure unfavorably. I principally use it with my laptop, and it's absolutely magnificent.
I have the Sanyo 4900 phone, fwiw, and it shows up to Linux as a USB modem using the standard acm.o driver. I get a pretty high latency, about 350ms ping to my gateway, but the bandwidth is around 20K/s (that's kiloBYTES) when I'm in a strong service area, averages around 12 if I'm moving around. Coverage is good, albeit not perfect. I drove from Atlanta to St Louis with a ping going the whole time, and lost less than 10 packets. There are a few dead zones in the rural area south of St Louis where my parents live, but not many (and we haven't found ANY cell phones that work in those areas, T-Mobile and Cingular all die in the same places)
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