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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?"
I have both. I have ADSL2+ at home with 802.11g wireless, and UMTS/HSDPA on the move. The ADSL2+ is faster, no question. UMTS/HSDPA is quite usable (up 2MB/s real-world speeds) and convenient because I can use it when I'm not at home.
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.
I work for a public sector org in the UK, and we have a community team of around 30 users, each with laptops running 3G data cards to give them access to our network (via VPN) when out doing what they do. This also allows them to work from home or wherever they choose - and allowed us to free up space in their offices by removing terminals. However, we quickly encountered problems with the mobile broadband connections having signal problems; various users complained about no signal at home or in certain areas of a city, or worse, in the office. I made the decision to put in wirless access points in each of the three team offices, and set up the laptops to use these instead of the mobile broadband when the connection was found. We also set up a separate VPN that didn't dial out on the mobile broadband, that they could tie into their own wireless conncections at home - this approach was a resounding success. So to summarise...I'd use both! You have to ask yourself if you are going to be using your laptop away from home enough to justify the mobile broadband option - if your staying at home, you can't beat using a wireless set up.
First of all the announced throughput is a best case figure. You'll never see it in actual use. Inside steel and concrete buildings you're certainly not going to see those figures. It all depends on the radio reception. The speed also depends (at lest with GPRS over UMTS and EDGE/GSM) on the number of active users on a particular cell.
Second, even if the throughput is ok the latency really sucks. It takes a while from you request a web page and until it actually starts flowing in. I've worked on this tech for a number of years and it's not nearly as good as marketing wants you to believe.
TCAP-Abort
I'd say since you both do a lot of mobile computing, its probably a good idea to go with the wireless broadband option. Here's some questions to think about, however:
1. How much data transfer do you do? A buddy of mine ran into trouble with Sprint for downloading craploads of ISOs on his connection. Your mileage may vary.
2. How good is the coverage where you live? Do you personally know someone using the service you're interested in, and if so, how reliable is their connection?
3. What operating system are you using? If you're running Windows you're probably okay for compatibility, but I had a fair amount of trouble using a couple of different broadband cards under Linux. I got them working, but only after significant hackery.
Just some things to consider.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
It depends on what you will use it for. I have standard 2Mb ADSL, that's the best I can get in the rural Irish area I live. I also have a Vodafone HSDPA USB modem for my laptop for when I'm not at home. The Vodafone modem is rated at 3.6Mb but that's bullshit. When on holidays during the summer, the house I stay at is in a valley, and the Vodafone mast is at the top of one of the hills overlooking the house. I can still only get approx 1Mb connection at best, and that's the fastest connection I've found in my travels around the country. Not only that, but the latency for the Vodafone connection is huge. It's definitely not for gaming, p2p, streaming video or audio. Email and web is basically all it's good for. Also, they tend to have a relatively small monthly cap.
I had a Verizon broadband card for my laptop here in the US (east coast). My experience was the it was OK (800 kbs) for web access and mail but no much more than that. The bigger problem was once you went indoors the signal quality dropped significantly, to the point it was useless. I was mostly using it indoors when traveling, it was so fustrating I cancelled the account.
A coulpe of points that you should look into (including the fine print):
:)
- Is there a data limit on the connection you're looking at (X GB/week, month, anything?).
- Is there an issue with encrypted traffic (some ISPs/Telcos will throttle or cut encrypted traffic to fight P2P, which will also impede your VPN)
- Will you have the coverage that you need, and will the coverage also extend to all the rooms in your house?
- How important is connectivity to you? (For me personally, I need to have at least one place where I can be 100% certain to be able to login through my VPN to my job) Does the roaming wireless fail often, or not? (This also relates to point 3)
- Assuming you're looking into this for work also, are you allowed to use relatively open wireless networks (I know that I'm not, since I work in the financial world)
I personally would keep the static line, despite the extra cost, just to have a 'base' to go to when things don't work elsewhere. This also gives me the possibility to log onto my home server and retrieve/store important data through my own VPN.
Lots of things to think about
On a totally unrelated note: Why do I have 10 (and not 5) moderator points??
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
It depends on your Internet habits. Do you do peer to peer? Then forget it. Verizon says they have an "unlimited" plan, but they've been known to whack high usage individuals. Sprint is better about that, but large usage does attract their attention. If you are interested in mobile broadband in the US, those are really your only two choices. The GSM providers (AT&T & T-Mobile) just don't have the bandwidth. So if you want speed, you gotta use a CDMA carrier. I can tell you from personal experience that my Sprint card pulls 1.5mbs in a lot of places. However, it should be noted that speed is completely dependent on how far away you are from the tower (taking into account obstructions) and how many people are on. So, if you're far away from the tower and there's a ton of people in the area using it regularly, that's also a good reason not to get mobile broadband.
The relative price you mentioned of mobile broadband vs cable confuses me. You are either getting colossally ripped off for cable broadband or you are not pricing unlimited plans for your mobile broadband cards. Normally, unlimited plans are around $50/mo. Get it. Trust me. I've got a friend at Sprint who's got stories of peoples' laptops getting trojaned and winding up with a $2000 bill in the mail for bandwidth overage. And I'm assuming that you and your wife are each getting a separate plan.
Or let's say you've got an excellent signal and ridiculous speeds at your house, are not a warez monkey, and you want to share a single card between you and your wife. Well, you can get a broadband router which takes PCMCIA mobile broadband cards. I picked this Airlink 101 at Fry's for $80. It's got an Ethernet switch and is an 802.11b/g access point. Only problem is if one of you goes on a trip and takes the card the other will have to steal the neighbors' WiFi.
-R
Disclaimer - I work for a company manufacturing 2G,3G,etc + datacards.
The most important thing you need to ask yourself is what is the intended use for these cards.
If you are surfing the net, skyping, watching UTube etc, then the wireless datacards (current generation) offer enough bandwidth to give a very comfortable feeling (comparable with cable).
If you are a very heavy net user, looking to have max speeds, then maybe you should be thinking about a more dedicated solution.
As to the actual speeds you will get, this all depends on the carrier and your location. ie 7,2MBps is the current "rated" download speed for the current generation of technology, but that is reduced if you are uploading at the same time. (ie it is approx 7,2Mbps shared for upload/download - NOT really, but it is close enough to make this comparision). Also, the datarate will depend on if the carrier has deployed a network in your area. If not, you will be dialed down to highest rated speed in the area (typically EDGE). Edge is ok for surfing normal pages, but you will get some lag if you are doing large downloads, etc.
The really nice thing about 2G/3G datacards is the flexibility. No matter where you go, where you are in the world you, once you can get a standard mobile phone connection, you have access to your internet/emails etc. Personally, this is fantastic for people "on the go".
Other thing to be cautious of - check to see if your service is "per Mbit" or flat fee per month. If you are paying "per Mbit", then you can be big bills if you are not carefull. The "flat fee per month" version is excellent if you can get it.
Overall, I love these cards, but be carefull of what you sign up for.
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.
I've got Sprint's mobile, and I love it. But then, I'm in a rural area and NOTHING else works. Satellite is a joke - unless you ONLY do web surfing and email. Anything with encryption is PAINFUL (including online banking). With Sprint, I get varying download speeds (I'm getting 860Kb now, but sometimes I get less). Anyway, I've got several computers in the house (I've got at least 2 running full time, plus a laptop). So, I'm SHARING the mobile connection using an EVDO Router (mine's from D-Link, but Linksys makes one, too). I plug the mobile card into the router, and the router provides Wi-Fi and LAN connection to my network of computers. Aside from the obvious cost savings, the difference is that communication between computers on the network is easier and faster, and sharing printers and other devices is possible. Try sharing a printer across the internet - you can do it, but it's not easy. If you have separate cards for each laptop, you might as well be in different countries. Communication between computers on Mobile broadband works the same between computers whether they're 6 feet or 600 miles apart.