AT&T’s DataConnect (USB Connect 881, free with a two-year contract and rebates, and $60 monthly) lets you connect to the Internet wherever you may be. Make no mistake, at top speed, it offers true high-speed wireless access—sometimes even faster than what you get on campus, especially during finals week in Olin Library when everyone is watching YouTube. Mobile Internet is pretty sweet, and it saved me some boredom during a car ride to Passover at Grandma’s but, when it comes down to it, I could not find much use for it besides watching high-speed YouTube in the library.
I tested the USB Connect 881. Most of the major carriers offer a similar unit and, for those who have PCI slots (like Macbook Pro users), there is a special card (AirCard 881, $49.99 with two-year contract and rebates) that you can slide right into your computer. I did not test the PCI card, so I cannot compare the speed, but I imagine that one would not notice a difference, though the PCI card is slimmer and takes up less space when attached to the computer.The USB card looks like a fat antenna hanging off of the side of your computer, which may annoy some but was fine by me.
Installation on my Macbook was simple. I had to download a driver from the card maker’s website, and OSX then integrated the card into my network connect settings. PC users will have to install a special program to get online, which is marginally more annoying, but can be easily fixed by just getting a Mac. When I popped in the card, it automatically connected, though sometimes it had trouble reconnecting if I put my computer to sleep when it was still plugged in. Unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed this problem.
Service plans are $60 monthly (plus the cost of the card) and, for this price, you get only five gigabytes of data. After that, they charge you an arm and a leg per extra megabyte. Five gigs are fine for sending e-mails and reading the news over the course of a month but, once you start watching videos or streaming music, that bandwidth goes fast. So don’t even think about getting all clever and buying one of these rather than cable Internet when you graduate.
The quality of the service is, of course, the most important consideration. Nothing is worse than facing an interrupted connection while cruising down I-95, perusing Facebook in the backseat. I’ve been there. I got 3G service (the fastest available currently, and roughly equal to broadband Internet) in most places around campus but, when going into more rural areas (even where my AT&T cellphone worked), I experienced data dropouts with the card. Often, it would drop down to 2.5G (slower Internet speeds) and be too excruciatingly slow to use. My erstwhile research assistant Jake Levine ’08, who took the card on a road-trip to Ithaca, reported a similar experience: slow and spotty in the car, but fast when he was stationary. Considering that most people will use this while on the road, this is a major drawback to the service.
Verizon also offers mobile web services at a similar price. It also recently started offering a plan for $39.99 per month that is capped at 50 MB of bandwidth, making it only useful for those who occasionally go online. In New England, the 3G network is active everywhere where there is voice service, making it more likely that one will have uninterrupted high-speed access. I did not get to thoroughly test out Verizon’s service, so I cannot comment on the validity of this claim, but reports I have read do rate it higher than AT&T’s.
As I mentioned, it really comes down to whether you will use it. As a college student who is usually on campus, the price is definitely too high. These cards are marketed to road-warrior professionals who spend a lot of their time sitting in cabs and at the airport. For them, who get their company to pick up the tab, these things are great. But for us, ultimately, it’s a waste. Prices will likely drop in the future, but the phone companies understand their primary clientele are business people on an expense account who don’t care about price. What would be cool is if AT&T and Verizon let their customers hook up Internet-enabled phones (like the iPhone) to their laptops. As it stands, customers who want high-speed access on their phone and laptop have to pay twice for the same service. Lame.
If you are going to be traveling a lot this summer and really need Internet access, you might consider getting a mobile broadband card. But even then, the price is probably too high, and who wants to stare a computer screen when our beautiful country is passing by outside? For this author’s money, high-speed mobile access is just going to have to wait until the phone companies stop price gouging. Until then, I’ll continue to live a (relatively) disconnected existence.
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