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?"

Re:Signal strength check

[Anonymous Coward]

The FIRST thing to do is look at their TOS. Almost every mobile carrier's TOS says "everything we implied in the advertising is a lie". Almost all of them prohibit gaming or large file transfer, yadayada.

The new WiMax critters like Clear seem to understand they have a market opportunity there though with their "no holds barred strictly on tiers of GB" policy.

Read the ToS

[LinkX39]

A coworker of mine who lives in a rural area out of range from all the cable and DSL providers was looking into going with a mobile broadband solution. Knowing nothing about the topic he handed me a Kricket brochure and asked if it was a good deal, and it was a good thing for him that he did. His intentions were to set up a webcam in his backyard so he could watch the animals as they came out of the woods. With that in mind I scanned the brochure and happened upon their terms of use, which stated that the service could only be used for normal web activities. Sounds reasonable, until you read their definition of "normal" activities which excluded server hosting, online video gaming and streaming video of any sort, meaning his webcam was out.

The moral? Make sure you read the terms of use to find out what the service allows before committing to it, otherwise you may end up paying for something you can't use.