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In-Home Wireless Vs. Mobile Broadband

Posted by Soulskill on from the ditching-another-landline dept.

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?"

2 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't by Plunky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First of all the announced throughput is a best case figure. You'll never see it in actual use.

    Another thing to consider is that I have found that my supplier (T-Mobile in UK, using GPRS) has an intercepting proxy server; they strip out 'unnecessary' parts of HTML pages, and re-compress any JPEG images at the highest most lossy (eg 50k->10k) setting in order to make it seem faster which also loses EXIF data.

    I don't know if this is only for GPRS or if it affects their 'broadband' services also but it seems to be limited to port 80 so its not too difficult to get around with a proxy but it can be annoying..

  2. Keep the landline by wikinerd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a landline ADSL with 1 ISP plus HSDPA cellular broadband with all (3) cellular ISPs that operate here. Cellular broadband is not supposed to replace landline broadband, it is simply for when you are out or whenever the landline isn't working. The latency of cellular access is too high compared to landline, the signal indoors is often poor (but you can use signal boosters), and many times even if one day you have signal after a few days you may find that the signal is gone because tower locations change often and not only that but the connection quality is also dependent on how many people connect near your tower. Not only that, but some cellular ISPs do not give you a real IP, or force you to use their proxy server (easily bypassed though) or even force you to use only their own software (also easily bypassed if you flash the firmware of your router or if you use a free OS such as Debian).

    Thus the perfect solution is to have both. If you can't pay for both, then the answer depends on how many hours of the day you are out. If you stay indoors only when you sleep, then certainly cellular boradband is the answer. But if you do stay indoors more than 3-4 hours of your awake life, then you shouldn't easily cancel the landline.