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Viability of Mobile Broadband For Home Use?
mighty7sd writes "I am about to be released from my contract with Time Warner for my home internet service, and I am evaluating alternatives to my current cable modem setup. I would love to use AT&T U-Verse or Verizon Fios, but they are not available in my area. I have a good idea of the costs and limitations of Cable and DSL service, so I am considering using mobile broadband for my home internet connection. Most providers seems to cap the connection at 5 GB of data transfer per month. I am a relatively heavy internet user using streaming video and a web server, so I need decent down/upload speeds and a large data transfer cap. Has anyone in the /. community had a good experience using mobile broadband cards at their home, specifically with lots of streaming video or a home server? What has happened if you have gone over your data transfer limit? Cricket Wireless is available in my area for $40 per month with 'unlimited' service, but I am skeptical that it is truly reliable and unlimited. I also found products that act as a WiFi router for mobile broadband services, but it seems that this is against most carriers TOS. Can they really detect these, and are they comparable to a wired broadband router?"
If you already have a data plan for your mobile phone then give this application a try: http://www.wmwifirouter.com/ It will turn your cell phone into a Access point. I use this application all the time when i'm on the road or when my connection goes down at home.
I did it for a number of months using Sprint and a USB Sierra Wireless Compass dongle (not sure of the model number, but it did work in Linux).
It worked for me, but there is a 5Gb/mo cap and would probably not fit your usage. Reliable, reasonably fast for what it is, worked flawlessly in XP and Ubuntu, and really gave me nothing to complain about.
I used my phone company's 3g connection for inet access after I moved apartments and had to wait 3 weeks for the adsl to be installed.
Unlimited 5mbit costed 30e/month and worked quite well, tho pings in online games were around 250-400ms (usually 50ms or so). After the 3 weeks period I had used 48GB of bandwidth.
The only issue is prolly the latency, which isnt so nice in multiplayer games. I live in scandinavia, so I dont know how its in USA tho. But for people in here, its a great alternative.
The 5 GB cap will kill you cable seems to be the best that you can get for now.
I have mobile broadband for work / support issues, and it does not do well with video streaming. ( watch 3 minutes, wait 3 minutes, repeat )
Audio streaming is just able to keep up most of the time.
I can certainly confirm the latency issues are noticeable, but for ssh / remote support it is use-able. buy a host site plan from a friendly web provider, and just remote admin the info.
Here is the information for ATT aircards:
Aircards: Sierra Wireless 885, 881, 881u, Option GT Ultra, Ultra Express, Quicksilver
5 GB/month
60 Dollars / Month
700kbps-1.7 mbps down, ~200 ping to google (on 3g)
75kbps-125kbps down, ~300 ping to google (on 2g)
When you go over 5 gigs, data useage is charged at half a cent per KB, but service will be turned off as soon as it is detected by the switch (which can take anywhere from an hour to a week, or forever)
Coverage map:
http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/
Phone support: 1-800-331-0500 (24 hours).
Using verizon in a metro area. I get 2.5mbps down and 512kbps up. Lowest ping time is around 80ms but usually around 100ms. If you idle a few seconds the modem will stop talking to the tower. The next packet out will wake up the modem and the initial ping will be around a second. and then back down to 100ms
I have a USB type modem hooked into debian. Have to plug the dongle into a windows box every so often to track my usage with the software they provide.
Go over and they charge me 25 cents a MB!
Sprint wants a 2 yr contract. No way around it but they only charge 10 cents a MB overage.
Verizon and ATT will allow you to buy the modem and then go month to month no contract. Its $60/m for all of them whether you go contract or not its just equipment price.
Verizon has a 10gb/m plan for $200 they don't advertise. Occasionally I have problems with getting a signal or it slows down.
The USB dongles usually get detected as multiple USB->serial adapters. However, the USB->serial driver under linux doesn't have sufficient buffer to get it over 200kbps. There is the airprime driver and 3g drivers depending on distro.
The PCMCIA and cardbus adapters usually get detected as a usb hub with multiple usb->serial adapters and the same thing happens as above.
From there its a matter of configuring PPP properly.
I'm using a verizon 760 usb modem under debian etch with the airprime driver. Had to hack the vendor id of the card into the airprime driver to recognize it. Plug in the usb dongle in, it gets detected as a usb cdrom. modprobe the airprime driver. eject /dev/sr0 and then it detects the usb->serial and attaches them via the airprime driver to /dev/ttyUSB0 thru /dev/ttyUSB14 (theres a bunch of them for measuring signal strength and txt messages but I never use them).
The building I live in was erected in the 1960's and doesn't have great service for Verizon or AT&T (I would know, I've been on contract with both). A bunch of dudes in the building I live in use AT&T and Verizon air cards pretty effectively. I've heard no complaints, but for now I'm sticking with Time Warner myself.
I am a full-time work-from-home WAN geek. I have Sprint data service, with an old PCMCIA card in a D-Link DIR-450 router; it's my backup Internet connection. From time to time, I've used it in short intervals (1 week) as my primary connection. I used to have problems with the connection resetting every 6 to 18 hours or so, although the connection state has seemed much more stable in the last few months. It still won't hold an outbound VPN connection for a full day at a time; my sessions last anywhere from 4 to 20 hours before needing to be restarted (and the same connection over DSL lasts for weeks). Throughput is more than servicable, and the rate is more constant than I'd expected. Jitter can be higher than you'd want for VoIP, especially if there's any other traffic on the line. The jitter could be mitigated if I used a decent router, but I still think I'd see a performance gap between wireless and wireline delay consistency. For mid-speed service and 99% uptime, it's a perfectly viable alternative. It's especially useful in some rural areas where the cellular data network reaches farther out in the country than DSL or cable. If you need great service 99.9%+ of the time with low latency and minimal jitter, stick with wireline.
Be wary of some of the wireless providers, because they seem to impose even more restrictions on Internet usage than wired providers.
You can use a sprint Novatel or Sierra card with a Linksys WRT54G-ST it is a 4 port router with a PCMCIA card slot in the top. It works like a normal DSL/Broadbad router, wired and wireless clients. I know they used to be $250.00 and then the cost of the card was $60.00 per month. As far as the speed, that truely depends on your area. I have seen them as fast a 1.3 upload and 700k download and slower. If you are using the Economy bundle through warner you will notice a slightly slower connection, anything faster you will really notice a difference. For 60.00 per month I am sure you can get a much faster broadband connection. DSL is not a great option for a heavy internet user. I would definately not recommend a mobile broadband solution. If you were a casual browser or strictly e mail user and traveled quite a bit, I would say this could be an option.
I had some good success with Verizon Wireless. Really, it depends on where you are , to how good the service will be. I've had better than 1Mb/s down while driving. Then again, I've had what felt like double digit bytes per seconds in not so great areas.
After one move I had a problem. The DSL provider said they could service the house. We gave them two weeks notice to get the new line ready. They were "provisioning" it for 3 weeks, until they finally said they couldn't do it. {sigh}
So we put in an order with the cable company. It took 2 weeks for the "install package" to come in, and 3 more days after I plugged it in for it to actually work. During that period, I had a PC with my Verizon Wireless air card up, and it acted as my NAT for the other computers. It wasn't a great area for cell service, because of the mountains. Even the wireless service was hit and miss. I swear, when it got windy, the service would go down. More likely, trees were blowing between my card and the tower, but I still blame the wind. :)
I highly recommend getting a card that has a jack for an external antenna. It makes a HUGE difference in service quality. Check out evdoinfo.com for good information on the card offerings from Verizon and Sprint.
The Verizon card gave me one thing that you can't get from a residential or business provider. I had my laptop running on a cross country drive, feeding telemetry (GPS data and video) to my web site, so friends and family could see what I saw and where I was. I got a call in the middle of the desert, asking if I was ok. I showed to be about 20 feet off the road, not moving, and facing desolate nothing. In reality, I was tired, pulled off into a rest area, parked the car facing away from the only building there, and was taking a nap. The rest area was new, so it didn't show on Google Maps yet, which is what I was using to show my location. I hadn't looked when I stopped, I just saw a place to sleep so I took it.
I opened one eye enough to look at the screen, saw where I was on the map (100 miles from nowhere, parked 20 feet off the road), confirmed that's where I was, told them it's a rest area now, and went back to sleep. :) After a couple hours, I woke back up, checked my email, did a little online recon to see what was ahead (not a damned thing), and then started driving again.
Sure there were some dead spots. My phone would drop, and the Internet connection would usually follow behind by about a minute. The card's antenna was suction cupped to the windshield, so it had a better signal than the phone. That was very intermittent though. Most of the time I had at least some sort of service. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Cricket Broadband FAQ:
You cannot use the service:
* As a router or web server
* To initiate VOIP conversations
* As a web hosting or email service
No really. I'm on a boat. I live aboard at the marina. Can't even get a POTS line, let alone DSL or FIOS or cable. But I have a very strong 3G signal at the docks, and even out in the Catalina channel.
I've lived aboard my boat for the past 8 months with Verizon Wireless as my only internet access. I play Xbox360 games, EVE Online, and download songs and the occasional video from iTMS. It's got better performance than the WiFi ISP that covers the marina. They charge $40/month and rate limit to 1Mb/sec download. I usually get at least that, and often up to 2200kb/sec. Latency is OK, 100-200ms. Fast games do not seem to lag.
I use the CradlePoint CTR-350 router on the boat, and carry a PHS-300 battery-powered hotspot with me on the commute to work which I use to listen to Pandora or surf the web on my iPod touch.
I have a grandfathered unlimited data plan for $59.95 that I've been using for three years before moving onto my boat.
Edith Keeler Must Die
The ones I've looked at in Britain give you a 192.168.x.x IP address, so no-ip isn't going to work whatever you do.
You have to be careful though. If you want to run a server, make sure your mobile broadband plan includes "VPN" access, otherwise you may find yourself NAT'ed and/or proxied. There are different tiers of service, and the ones you may want will be the most expensive.
The "unlimited data" plans often are for smartphones, and they often put you in a private IP space behind a NAT/transparent proxy with filtering. Even if you tether, you may still be limited to the NAT, and still be transparently proxied. If you tether improperly, you may end up paying dearly since you will use the wrong gateway/APN.
If you want a full proper publicly-accessible IP, you'll have to ask if your provider has a "VPN" plan (because a few VPN services break behind NAT, or you may be required to have a reverse probe), and these plans are often quite expensive for very little data.
An alternative might be the so-called "portable internet" devices, where you get a device that plugs into the wall, and connect to it via Ethernet. These can be cheaper, and more to what you're used to. however, they're often only available in metropolitan areas.
Well, some building materials absorb more signal than others. The more porous the stuff is, the more decibels it will soak up. I can't remember, but I think one major thing is asbestos. I'd have to do some testing to say for sure, but I can tell you that it is a major factor.
I used my phone tethered exclusively for over a year and was satisfied.
However I didn't do much with videos, just Second Life and streaming music there and the like.
Download rates from DSLReports ran about 750 down at my tower (below average), if I drove down the highway I could get 1100 down from neighboring towers. I forget what the upload rate was, maybe 250ish?
SL daily plus music streams was tons of data, but I had Sprint's unlimited plan.
The only other issue was when it would reconnect, which happened fairly frequently and was only an interruption of a sec, but disrupted SL and would need a reload if a page was in the midst of loading. There were a couple outages impacting just my local tower, once for a week. However all outages still provided dialup speeds, only the EVDO was out.
It was possible to watch streaming video if you let half the video download first.
IMO the needs specified are greater than what EVDO will provide.
>slower than wired(of similar price, I'm not talking netzero dialup).
Agreed. Ive used EVDO broadband cards many times at my last job and, frankly, theyre barely passable as mobile solutions and they make terrible fixed solutions. Ive noticed:
At any moment the card may want to switch you to a different tower. Say goodbye to any established session.
At any moment youll drop to dial-up speeds because the card decides it doesnt have enough signal to maintain EVDO and drops to 1X.
Serious throttling. I have yet to be able to download a torrent faster than .01 KB/sec
Speed issues. I probably average 200-400kbps with 1mbps peaks.
Heating issues. Those cards get hot. Theyre not designed for 24/7 use.
Serious latency and packet loss.
Frequently changing IP. Like 10x a day.
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That said, there might be a WISP solution for him, but Id rather have a 1.5mbps solid DSL line than a 3mbps mobile wireless connection.
I work for verizon wireless, and I can say without a doubt that if you do alot of streaming video you will hate your bill. I've seen bills upwards of $30,000. The connection is just not designed for it. If you go over the 5gb cap you pay .25 per mb and that adds up quick also once your over 5gb they throttle your speeds to 25% of what they were. I had one lady with $1200 in overage and all she did was go to myspace and youtube. Imo stick with a landline mobile broadband is for occasional light use and serving. If not maybe itll be me that tells you your stuck with the bill. ;)