The other thing you need to carefully consider before getting a CDMA card/account is what you want to use itt for. I worked in Customer Service for a large national provider, and the absolute worst calls to get were people who thought that an "unlimited data transfer" account allowed them to do everything they would do on a broadband account.
Well, check that EULA, cowboy, because in a lot of cases (heck, I even found one in my comcast cable EULA) there's a special "appropriate use" or "bandwidth abuse" clause that will allow them to slap you with huge, I mean thousands of dollars in some cases that I saw, if you do things like p2p or streaming video.
The other problem is that the provider, in every case that I've seen, won't tell you where the threshold is that unlimited is no longer really unlimited. It's based off some calculated cost of carrying your subscription that the corporate office usually doesn't even share with their CS folks, and if they do happen to know, they won't share it with you the customer for fear of disciplinary action. Once you pass that nebulous line, your account is shut off and any data transfer you got in before they noticed and shut you off (nope, it's not even an automated process)is charged to you to the tune of something around $0.25 a K. We had one college student run Kazaa or something similar on her CDMA connection for month, doing megabyte after megabyte over the limit, and she, no joke, ended up with a bill in the neighborhood of $23,000.
In any event, speeds on our network, which were heavily connection-strength dependent, ran an average of probably 120k, and were effectively faster for html traffic with the provided compression software. It seemed like an ok tech for mobile professionals of the sort who don't always have time to go to a hotspot to send and receive e-mail, but I would recommend it to very few people outside that rarefied set.
That's... that's absurd.
I cannot think of a way to logically defend your position that rural areas foster independent views while cities give rise to "groupthink."
If by independent you mean "uninformed," then maybe there's a middle ground we can meet in.
Seriously, consider that those in rural areas have contact with an absolutely miniscule pool of people compared to ones in a city, the populations tend to be racially homogenized, people tend to be related to more of their immediate neighbors (no, that's not a sister-marrying reference), there's far less media penetration, little broadband penetration, smaller libraries, lack of university libraries.... where the hell are they getting the information to form these independent views FROM in your fantasy world?!
I honestly can't understand how you would come to your conclusion... I... I think my brain is going to lock up, and the fact that someone modded you insightful is making it worse.
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The other thing you need to carefully consider before getting a CDMA card/account is what you want to use itt for. I worked in Customer Service for a large national provider, and the absolute worst calls to get were people who thought that an "unlimited data transfer" account allowed them to do everything they would do on a broadband account.
Well, check that EULA, cowboy, because in a lot of cases (heck, I even found one in my comcast cable EULA) there's a special "appropriate use" or "bandwidth abuse" clause that will allow them to slap you with huge, I mean thousands of dollars in some cases that I saw, if you do things like p2p or streaming video.
The other problem is that the provider, in every case that I've seen, won't tell you where the threshold is that unlimited is no longer really unlimited. It's based off some calculated cost of carrying your subscription that the corporate office usually doesn't even share with their CS folks, and if they do happen to know, they won't share it with you the customer for fear of disciplinary action. Once you pass that nebulous line, your account is shut off and any data transfer you got in before they noticed and shut you off (nope, it's not even an automated process)is charged to you to the tune of something around $0.25 a K. We had one college student run Kazaa or something similar on her CDMA connection for month, doing megabyte after megabyte over the limit, and she, no joke, ended up with a bill in the neighborhood of $23,000.
In any event, speeds on our network, which were heavily connection-strength dependent, ran an average of probably 120k, and were effectively faster for html traffic with the provided compression software. It seemed like an ok tech for mobile professionals of the sort who don't always have time to go to a hotspot to send and receive e-mail, but I would recommend it to very few people outside that rarefied set.
I cannot think of a way to logically defend your position that rural areas foster independent views while cities give rise to "groupthink."
If by independent you mean "uninformed," then maybe there's a middle ground we can meet in.
Seriously, consider that those in rural areas have contact with an absolutely miniscule pool of people compared to ones in a city, the populations tend to be racially homogenized, people tend to be related to more of their immediate neighbors (no, that's not a sister-marrying reference), there's far less media penetration, little broadband penetration, smaller libraries, lack of university libraries.... where the hell are they getting the information to form these independent views FROM in your fantasy world?!
I honestly can't understand how you would come to your conclusion... I... I think my brain is going to lock up, and the fact that someone modded you insightful is making it worse.