Viability of Mobile Broadband For Home Use? 177
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?"
Signal strength check (Score:5, Insightful)
Contact your city management! (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell them about what is going on in N.Carolina and tell them that it will produce friendlier and more regular income to the city than traffic signal cameras. You may get fiber at your door with high speed up and down instead of slow up and fast down.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
I'm almost certain that running a server would be against the ToS, and yes it is fairly easy to detect. Hmmm...incoming Port 80/443 traffic...
I know a couple people who've switched to mobile broadband for their main link, but they are not heavy users. Checking e-mail, searching Google, general web browsing, yes. Frequent streaming media? Not unless it is postage stamp sized.
And Cricket's data plan isn't 3G so it would be a dog.
For home use?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Er, why are you considering this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are on the road most of the time, or need an ISP now, not in three weeks when the cable guy gets off his ass and install, then fine. But why would a self described heavy user even consider going with it for home use?
huh??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a good idea of what the costs and limitations of Cable and DSL service,
So you are...considering getting something even more expensive, even slower, and with even tighter caps than the worse cable caps?
???
WiMax vs. 3G vs. 4G Speed Mythologies (Score:3, Insightful)
WiMax can support very high speed connections and very long distances, and has great hype with it. But in reality, it can support very high speeds over short distances, or moderately low speeds over long distances, and ISPs have to make some tradeoff in between based on how many customers they can get in the cell around a given antenna, and by the time they're done, it's no longer spectacularly shiny. (4G doesn't really exist yet, so of course it'll be really really cool when it gets here, while 3G was really really cool last year until it was widely deployed....) The two main 3G services have technology upgrade paths that are being deployed, so services will probably get faster (though you may need new hardware), while WiMax may be faster now than after it gets more customers, at least if you're close enough to have a strong signal.
In reality, you need to look at what's available where you live - can you get a good signal or not? - and on the service provider's terms of service, and other services you may also be buying (TV? Wired phones? Mobile phones?), and on how mobile you plan to be. 3G has the advantage that you've probably got some friends who have the service providers you want to try out, and you can invite them over to find out if you can actually get good enough speeds or not.
(You've probably already figured out whether you currently hate your cable company or your cellphone company or your wired phone company more...) - but do read the service plan details carefully, because "unlimited" usually doesn't _actually_ mean "not having limits" unless the marketing people have recently gotten spanked by regulators, so it's likely that they'll have fine print you need to care about saying what the limits are and how much excess bandwidth costs. Unfortunately, for wireless providers, heavy bandwidth use translates into cell capacity exhaustion, so dealing with it may cost them actual money, as opposed to wired providers where it only translates into statistical increases in their peering and transit usage, which is a lot cheaper, and they're still only slowly getting the clues that computer users have much higher bandwidth expectations than cellphone/text/paging users, so they may not realize where the boundaries of "greedy" vs. "cheapskate" are.