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?"

2 laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

How are you going to share the connection? Ad-Hoc wifi?

My experience...

[red star hardkore]

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.

Re:Don't

[teh kurisu]

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

[Plunky]

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..

Bandwidth caps...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile broadband in the US and UK are plagued by invisible bandwidth caps on the "unlimited" accounts. This makes mobile broadband difficult to justify especially in this day and age where multimedia-over-internet seems to be the norm. Until the wireless companies employ a more affordable model, it makes no sense for a non-business funded user to subscribe.

Re:How much do you download?

[speeDDemon (nw)]

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.

Decent article on performance

[FingerSoup]

Hub Magazine [hubcanada.com] in Canada has a decent article in this month's edition - The format is kinda nasty (Bitmap for Web viewing - eww) - but the content gives a breakdown of canadian providers. Basically, you are looking at high latency with less than advertised speeds across the board, but you can connect anywhere your cellphone can.

Re:Don't

[TheRaven64]

I am thinking of moving to 3.

I thought about this too. Then I phoned their sales team to get them to clarify what they meant by 'Internet' in their adverts. Apparently it means 'port 80, filtered.' The only thing to do seems to be complain to OFCOM.

Keep the landline

[wikinerd]

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.

Re:Data Limit, Reliability.

[kent_eh]

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 :)

Here in Canada I would agree, keep the fixed system for at home.
My cable internet costs about $60/month flat rate. Although they (like most it seems) have mysterious limits to their "unlimited" service, I've never hit it.
The only HSDPA service here is Rogers/Fido (although for some reason they call it HSPA). The least expensive package I can find from them (using a PCMCIA modem) is $65/month max 1Gig/month (2gig $75, 3gig $85, 5Gig $100, $.03/Mb above that).
I have tried it out, and it feels speedy enough to use for general surfing. Didn't try sustained download speed tests, though.
The sales guy says they are upgrading speeds later this year "double what it currently is" he said. I assume that means they are moving to 7.2Mb

Re:Keep The In-Home Wireless....

[Rakeris]

Many people seem to be under the impression you have to have a special router to share an EVDO connection. This is NOT the case!! All you need is a normal router/wireless router. All you do is connect the router to your PC like normal, tell you PC to share the connection to the routers default IP, and it will share the connection just fine. Mine works with my Wii and my wireless laptop great.