Cellular broadband - I don't know anything about it, educate me?

[PingSpike]

I don't own a cellphone. I never have. I don't have anything against them, I'm just cheap and much of my state is rural and they don't work everywhere.

I have no internet access at my house outside of dialup.

My primary desire is to be able to play internet games at home with decent latency. I would also like to do some moderate bittorrent usage and of course general downloading and websurfing...these are honestly secondary goals to the gaming and decent latency. Do cellular internet services usually meet these requirements? My research so far seems to suggest they do.

Cellular coverage is questionable at my house. I've only had a few people over that tried to use their cellphone and they've had mixed success. I don't know if mounting a big antenae on my roof will help here or if they were just on a different network or what. Again, I actually no very little about cell phones.

I've heard verizon's 'unlimited' plan is a scam and if you put it to any use you are dropped after passing an unadvertised bandwidth cap. I'd rather not deal with this.

I've heard sprint is better in this regard. On Sprint's website, the nextel section of their coverage map seems to indicate it reaches me. Will they let me "try before I buy" or let me out of a contract if I can't get reliable service where I am?

Anything else in general you guys can tell me from your experience with this stuff?

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

<--- gadgets gear and phones forum

 

[PingSpike]

I was not even aware that sub category existed here...whoops?

 

[ScottyB]

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[pm]

My parents use Verizon (mom), and AT&T 3G(dad) as their ISP connections. They live well outside of any towns and there are no other options except dial-up and satellite.

My mother uses a Verizon PC5750 card into a D-Link DIR-450 WiFi router (http://www.dlink.com/products/?model=dir-450). She's been using it for a long time... I know she's out of her contact. At least 2 years, probably closer to 4 years total. She has Verizon BroadbandAccess service only - her cell is a iPhone on AT&T. In general, she likes it. The router with WiFi enables her PC, her laptop and her iPhone as well as a wireless picture frame to all work at once. The data rates that she gets are decent - somewhere in the 300-500kilobits per second range download, somewhere around 100kilobits per second upload. The latency, as I recall, is not up to hard-core gaming levels. As I recall, it's somewhere in the 100-150ms range. But it's been literally 3 years since I last did a "ping" on her set up and I'm not sure that I'm remembering it correctly except that I recall that I thought it was too high to do decent VOIP on it. Verizon does have a monthly data cap of 5GB and they actively throttle data rates on their network if you sustain high rates. They don't at all like VOIP or P2P on their network. None of this affects my mom who just wanted an always-on, faster-than-dial-up, simple-to-use Internet service for her house

My father uses AT&T 3G for his laptop for travelling - he has used the service since rouhgly Nov. 2007. He has a USBConnect 881 into his laptop's USB port. He is generally pleased with it as well, although he complains that service coverage is pretty poor. When he has great reception, then the service works very well. His data rates are around 800-1100 kilobits per sec. download, and around 200kilobits per second upload but his latency, as I recall, was much worse than Verizon and was around 200-300ms. But he said coverage is very spotty and when he only has a low signal then it crawls along at speeds as slow as dial-up.

There is definitely a "try before commit" period for both AT&T and Verizon. I believe it's about 7 days but ask the sales people and check it in the written contract before you agree to anything.

Putting a big antenna on your roof won't help - unless you want to go totally serious with this and get a hyper-expensive cell phone repeater - but you can add an external antenna to the card itself. See this site: http://www.evdoforums.com/forum-19.html

So, in summary, I have no experience with Sprint, but I've heard/read that they have the best service for data. AT&T likely doesn't have 3G where you are - but even if they did, the latency on AT&T's 3G is probably going to be unacceptably high for you, I think, but you can try before you buy and see. Verizon's data cap awould likely rule them out as well... but if you are on dial-up now... 5GB is pretty high... Because of these issues with AT&T and Verizon, my advice is that I'd go and talk to the Sprint salespeople and see what they say.

For research, there's a huge amount of info from people using Sprint and Verizon for home service here: http://www.evdoforums.com/