Ok, so I currently have AT&T for my familys cell phones. I would like to get a cellular data plan for my laptop. I see that AT&T has a plan called DataConnect for 60.00 a month with a limit of 5GB. That sounds like an awfully small amount, because I will be away from home and will be video conferencing with family back and forth. Or thats my plan anyway. Where I am going has coverage for every provider.
My question is, what provider has the best data plan for the money? Speed, cost, and data limits taken in as a factor. I wanted to get AT&T just because of not wanting to add another bill, but if there is another, better plan, I am up for that too. Thanks for your advice!
Do you have a PDA?
I have the unlimited data plan for my Pocket PC for $40/month. I do Slingbox, surfing, email, etc. on the Pocket PC phone. This "plan" of course does not include unlimited data via your laptop, but you can connect your laptop to your Pocket PC Phone the same way you would to sync it, and use it as a connection to the Internet.
Last year when I was going into the hospital for a pre-planned surgery, I didn't like the sound of the fact that the hospital (unlike many now days) did not have wireless (or hard wired) Internet in the rooms. Being a business owner and knowing I'd be cooped up for a WEEK, I purchased a little program called PDANet. PDANet is a software that allows you to connect your laptop to your PDA and use the Internet on your laptop. It handles the traffic the same way it does if you are downloading to the handheld device, so the cell network sees it as unlimited usage on your PDA. I was never charged a penny more.
Speed wise, this was not as fast as broadband speeds at home, but it was faster than dial-up would be. It makes for a good backup at a fair price. I think the software ran about $25.
As far as the high fees of a laptop card and available plans, I think they are worried (and rightfully so) that idiots out there would be using their cell network for torrent downloads and using 500-600GB a month like broadband cable and DSL providers sometimes see with their top abusers (see recent news about Comcast throttling traffic because of a few bad apples in the bunch).
I have since purchased a 3G phone, and my PDA Internet traffic is much faster, so I am sure that the traffic would fly on the laptop now. But I have no real need for it right now and have not used PDANet since the hospital stay. But it is nice to know there is a backup.
Edit 7:22PM- I decided I better test my backup and found that I needed version 2.0 of the software for my newer phone. The upgrade was free. I installed the software and disabled my Ethernet/Wireless and tested the connection. It pulled up the web pages I tested much faster than I remember from last year when I had an earlier 2.5G phone. I would only use my laptop this way as backup in a pinch, however. It is pretty fast using 3G, but I already knew that from the usage I get out of it on the PDA phone itself. Speed isn't the issue using Internet on the PDA. The real problem is the tedious process of typing an email on the small HTC keyboard. But that is what portable is all about I guess.
