Bitless in Tucson
Written on February 8, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
This afternoon I had a call from Verizon‘s sales, following up on our recent purchase of one of their AirCards and data plan. I told the rep that while we had no technical problems with the setup, and were actually pretty happy with it, their 5 GB cap is completely inadequate. In fact, four days ago I unplugged the system to avoid going over our limit, as we have used 4135 MB out of our 5120 MB monthly allowance, and as yet have two weeks to go before the end of the billing period. She apologized, of course, and regretted that Verizon doesn’t have a reasonably priced plan for us. They do offer a 10 GB plan, but US$200/month (plus taxes, etc.) is simply more than we’re willing to pay for what would still be inadequate, given that we have made a sincere effort to keep the bandwidth usage down and have been unable to do so. If we were paying that kind of money, I would not want to have to scrimp and save every bit that goes through our router, but that’s what it would take to stay under even 10 GB.
In the course of the conversation, though, after I explained how we use the internet, particularly for connecting to Second Life, she told me that while Verizon doesn’t have a plan that can help us, there is another major carrier in the US that has an unlimited data plan. She just couldn’t tell me who it was, being a competitor and all that. I thanked her for the info, and started doing some research. The Verizon rep told me we still have until the 14th of February to return our AirCard without having to pay a penalty to cancel our existing plan if we decide to go to another carrier, so time is of the essence.
After talking to AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, though, I’ve come to the unhappy conclusion that we are stuck. Oh, there are some unlimited data plans out there, in particular from Sprint (their Simply Everything® plan) and T-Mobile (who have a plan called Total Internet for Data Cards), but each has show-stopping details. The Sprint plan only works with some phones, and while some of their phone descriptions say they can be connected to a laptop (“tethered”), it’s not necessarily something they encourage, and they certainly don’t tell you how to connect it to a wireless router. In particular, the T-Mobile rep told me that while it may be possible to connect a phone to one of our computers, it would be really slow, possibly even slower than dial-up. That obviously won’t work for us.
February 8th, 2009 at 5:48 am
thank you for your Info…this is very helpful….I’m gonna try that
February 8th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Hope it helps, Marty! I’m still working on it, but I think we’ve got the Trojan Horse. There is still something going on, but it’s probably unrelated.