Road Warrior Tip – Bring your own WiFi
I’m going on the road, possibly quite a bit this month. As such I thought I would share some of my tips on how I travel and stay techie. Tip #1: Bring your own WiFi.
While AT&T is fine when it comes to the iPhone, their broadband service is worst of class. I don’t suggest using your iPhone as a WiFi or WAN gateway as the AT&T network will just strain under your attempted load. And by the way, if you’re in California like I am right now, AT&T will just simply give up and give you no bandwidth whatsoever. The cold hard reality of it is: AT&T can’t keep up with demand. Until they roll out their 850MHz spectrum across the US I suggest getting a Verizon MiFi.
Sprint sells the MiFi as well, and rumors are that AT&T will be bringing it on board soon too. Ignore all of the other providers. When it comes to 3G access that is equal across the US, Verizon is the winner here. Sprint is a fairly close second, but unlike Verizon the network will vary quite a bit from city to city and frankly their support sucks.
The Verizon MiFi is an amazing device. You can get up to 4 hours of WiFi access off this little box. It is small, light and easy to carry with you. Turn it on and BLAM, your computer connects via WiFi. No stupid WAN card to plug in, no dumb Internet sharing settings, just turn it on and let trusted people join your WiFi network.
It comes with the SSID and WiFi password printed on the bottom of the device. The first thing I did was log in to the device and change the SSID and password to something that matches my own internal networks, so I can easily get family and friends on my WAN network. You can tweak the device to your hearts content. So long as your hearts content consists of only tweaking the SSID and security settings.
There is one major downside: pricing. With a 2 year contract the device is $99 after a $50 mail in rebate. That in itself is not too bad, but where they get you is the contract. You get up to 5GB of transfer for $60 a month. That is the largest package they have. Of course Sprint and AT&T are no better with the same pricing and same caps (note that at this time there is no MiFi for AT&T). It used to be that one could get unlimited bandwidth for $99 a month, but that option seems to be all but gone. Seems the cellular carriers are starting to see the strain of data access on their networks.
I’m not 100% sure but I think you might be able to use Verizon DayPass with this device which allows you to pay just $15.00 for 24 hours of access. This way if you only travel once a month or so can just pay for the device as you need it. That is about the same cost as the access at an airport and you can still use it at your hotel. Not for me as I want, really, unlimited bandwidth but it may work for some.
All in all this is a great device and I highly suggest everyone check it out. Novatel did a fantastic job here and I’m thus far impressed with Verizon’s data network. Never been a huge Verizon fan, but I’m starting to swing that way more and more every day.
[...] by Adam on Sep.13, 2009, under Uncategorized This past week was busy! I spent my holiday weekend flying to San Francisco with Ben to do audio on a technology pilot. We landed safely in SF around midnight on Monday and proceeded to crash a few hours later at the hotel. On Monday we took some time to drive into the city and check a few things out. I like to consider myself a nerd, especially when it goes to gadgets, but Ben tops them all (he’s quite proud of this too). Before we actually made it to the city we stopped at a Verizon store so he could pick up a MiFi. AT&T was giving us some trouble so he took the opportunity to try out some new tech. It’s actually really cool – he has a full write up here. [...]