In-Home Wireless Vs. Mobile Broadband

mklickman writes "I've been hearing more and more about mobile broadband offered by the big wireless phone providers, and for the first time came to ask myself how it compares to using a wireless router. Since my wife and I both have laptops, and we're out a lot, would it be wise and/or worth it to do away with the standard cable-modem-plus-router setup and switch over to mobile broadband with (for example) AT&T or Sprint? I'm not really concerned about the cost of the PC cards themselves; they're not much more expensive than a decent router. Also, the cost of the wireless service per month is only (roughly) ten dollars more than my current ISP is charging me. Is it a good idea?"

Comments

How much do you download?

[DuncanE]

My experience... at lease here in Australia... is that Mobile broadband works very well (remember much of our country is unpopulated desert).

May lower class people use it to get broadband at the place they rent. They dont have to involve the landlord to get an cables installed and can take it with them when they move elsewhere.

The big killer is that here is Oz mobile broadband typically comes with transfer limits in the order of 1 - 4 GBs per month. After that it gets very pricey.

So assuming its the same in the US... I would only go mobile broadband if you dont plan on downloading movies/tv shows etc over the connection.

Re:Convenience vs Performance

[arivanov]

1. You are lucky to see speeds like that. I have the same combination and I see speeds under 128Kbit under realistic conditions in the UK. It is very rare for the speed to go above 256K. In fact the only places I have seen it higher are non-UK networks.

2. The question of DSL vs 3G has a very simple answer. The answer is a question in itself - do you have a home server and where does your traffic come from?

If your mail, media, etc is stored on a machine at home, 3G is shooting yourself in the foot. Your traffic ends up going all the way down to the GGSN at the mobile operator and than all the way back up to your kit at home (often through the narrow side of a cable or DSL). If all of your stuff is sitting in a colo somewhere or is on your laptop and you have good 3G coverage, than 3G can compete with DSL for the time being.

This is a definitely "for the time being" case because as more and more devices in the home become networked a device whose traffic has to travel across half of the country to connect to the rest of the kit becomes a white elephant.