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?"

Convenience vs Performance

[_merlin (160982)]

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.

Re:Convenience vs Performance

[arivanov (12034)]

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.

Re:Convenience vs Performance

[cybereal (621599)]

On your point of "luck" about the GP's claim of speeds, you missed that he said HSDPA, which is sometimes called "3.5g" it's much faster than 3G, it's just similar enough tech to not warrant considering it a new generation of connectivity.

Just wanted to clear that up for anyone following this for bandwidth curiosities.

Re:Convenience vs Performance

[arivanov (12034)]

I have tried and tested it all over the UK. East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Greater London and all the way to Glasgow.

While Pilkington-K and similar treated doubleglazed windows (not just any doubleglazed) drop the signal a bit, it is not the windows that are a problem. It is the tech in itself and the coverage. You need a non-congested Node-B to get anywhere near HSDPA speeds. As the number of clients on the Node-B grows the speed drops in x2 steps because even idle clients use parts of the code tree.

So as the tech is becoming more and more popular the network becomes worse and worse. As a result you can probably still get HSDPA speeds out there in residential suburbia. Getting HSDPA speeds in downtown lodnon, at railway stations or any other place where there are loads of clients (even non-active ones) is practically impossible.

Re:Convenience vs Performance

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

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.

When I use UMTS in the UK, I typically get around 400Kb/s (50KB/s). From attempting to do file transfers to my phone, this appears to be the fastest it can push data over the bluetooth connection, so the speed to the tower might be faster. The big difference is the caps. Mobile data connections often have a cap of around 3GB/month and you can go through this very easily with a big download or two or some iPlayer usage.

That said, a friend of mine used UMTS for his home connection for about a year. He used the broadband at work for big transfers and the UMTS cap was high enough to let him browse the web (including videos of kittens on YouTube) and check his mail from home.

How much do you download?

[DuncanE (35734)]

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:How much do you download?

[mrbluze (1034940)]

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

Additionally, there are pretty terrible contracts for mobile broadband (telstra is asking for 24 months last time i checked), so early adopters are once again subsidising later (smarter) takers. Rental properties can easily get ADSL connected without the landlord needing to know about it, because no modifications need to be done on the property.

Mobile broadband, in my opinion, is something that only makes sense if you need it for your business. When it comes to personal/recreational use, such as on holiday or something to check emails and whatever, it might be easier to plug (or bluetooth) your laptop into your 3G mobile and surf the net that way, or just check into a hotel or cafe with wifi. That's what I have done up until now and, basically, it doesn't cost me $500+ extra per year to do it, in contrast to the mobile broadband.

I suspect the demand for mobile broadband in Australia has not been as big as was hoped. Actually I am still at a bit of a loss why they are rolling it out when the alternatives are so cheap and so adequate at this point. It doesn't make financial and practical sense to me unless it's a tax deductible thing and you are making money from it in excess of the cost of ownership.

Re:How much do you download?

[speeDDemon (nw) (643987)]

Another killer is latency, typically >100ms. Which for a lot applications has little effect, but when compared to ADSL and Cable their latency is unsurpassed. Which for gaming is critical. I wouldn't trade my 8ms ping to my favorite game servers for any amount of mobility.

Re:How much do you download?

[totally bogus dude (1040246)]

It's not just gaming either - web surfing is much faster over ADSL than 3G. While you can get pretty good download speeds out of 3G, the latency means it takes a while to build up to the full transfer rate (TCP slow start). Most web pages don't have content large enough that you'll get to full speed, so the browsing experience feels more like "good dialup" than it does "mobile broadband".

You could also consider getting a phone with internet access that allows "tethering" (at least, I think that's what the kids are calling it these days) so you can access the internet using your laptop via the phone's 3G data service. At home (in .au) I have ADSL2+ in my apartment and 500 mB/month via 3's "X Series" package. It costs me an extra $20/mo but means I do have internet access on the go without the expense of a separate mobile broadband plan. Using your phone for it also means you can have basic internet access even if you don't have your notebook with you, which can be handy.

Re:How much do you download?

[Stonent1 (594886)]

May lower class people use it to get broadband at the place they rent.

Lower class? I didn't realize I was in the presence of nobility, m'lord.

Why not just say proletariat? Then I can call you bourgeoisie. But I'm not by any stretch left of center so I'll leave it be.

Re:How much do you download?

[DingerX (847589)]

I have the same problem on Friday evenings, especially in typing Yike! Don't beer me! Not Beer Please!. My Bartender, Ike, never seems to get it right.

Wirless and/or Mobile BB

[ghostpirate_jay (1162881)]

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.

Don't

[johnjaydk (584895)]

No. It's not a good idea.

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.

Re:

[teh kurisu (701097)]

The speed also depends (at lest with GPRS over UMTS and EDGE/GSM) on the number of active users on a particular cell.

To be fair, this also applies to ADSL connections. Most residential ADSL users (in the UK at least) are subject to a 50:1 contention ratio.

Re:Don't

[chill (34294)]

The grandparent is picking nits.

While it is true the DSL is a switched technology and not shared like cable, that only applies to the wire from your house to the DSLAM. At that point it aggregates and the ATM uplink is most certainly oversubscribed.

DSL oversubscription is just one hop up the line, as opposed to cable, where it is oversubscribed from end to end. Not much difference, really.

Re:Don't

[Plunky (929104)]

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..

Depends.

[palegray.net (1195047)]

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.

My experience...

[red star hardkore (1242136)]

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.

Signal may be poor indoors

[wazepp (1244080)]

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.

I have ATT but...

[deadmongrel (621467)]

I have been using ATT (Baton Rouge) and speeds are much lower than they advertise. surprise! surprise! ATT speeds suck when you on highways or cities where they have just edge service. Verizon on the other hand has better throughput rates but verizon is costlier than ATT($20 something) and they have an "Download Limit". VZ would disconnect you if are a heavy user. I am not sure about sprint but I have heard so many horror stories about their billing practices.

If you go with ATT you probably have to buy an antennae to boost your signal. You are better off having the cheapest plan for your Cable/DSL service in addition to you mobile broadband card.

Data Limit, Reliability.

[splutty (43475)]

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??

Depends...

[retro128 (318602)]

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 [airlink101.com] 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.

Nope.

[darthflo (1095225)]

To make it quick: I wouldn't recommend the switch.

I have been using a swiss provider's HSPA network for several months now and am not quite satisfied. The latency is bad (500~2000 ms ping rtt compared to 10-30 ms via ADSL1), availability isn't that great (often I can only get mediocre GPRS/EDGE speeds around 80-150 kbps) and the price's definately higher than a landline.
On the other hand, when HSPA works, it's great. An RTT of somewhere around 300 ms is possible and a sustained transfer rate of around 1 mbps is realistic (most of the network's 1.8 mbps HSDPA, being upgraded to 3.6; so I expect 2 mbps real bandwidth in the near future). Also, I've got this nice subscription where you pay a monthly flat fee (some 20% of an average 3 mbps landline or 2 GB WWan plan) plus a small fee per day of usage (some 7% of said landline or 2 GB WWan plan). Whenever possible I'll use public WLans and my private VPN server, limiting my WWan use to some 5-10 days per month.

Keep the landline

[wikinerd (809585)]

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.

Share the connection!

[dsmaher (958730)]

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.