Well I am now working from home, no office, freelancing, contracting, consulting, whatever you call it. I kitted out one room in my home as an office ... and then end up doing all my work at the Someday Cafe (geez, they have a blog - it's like there is a spirit universe floating behind the real one or something!). But owing to the requirements of my job, I must be online while I work. Enter the EDGE card from my cellular provider, AT&T.
It is a new (this month) cellular modem, using a new nationwide cell network, the EDGE network, that promises to provide decent speeds (greater than dial-up) pretty much wherever you are. Seems like most big cities are covered so far.
So far I have used it only at home and at the Someday, but it's quite serviceable - a little antenna sticking out the side of my laptop provides any where from 65kbps to 115kpbs, according to two bandwidth-metering sites. Also, I downloaded a big file once and got about 13Kbytes per seconds - more than 3 times dial-up! The way it feels? For regular surfing, metafiltering, googling, slashdotting, perfectly fine. There is a little delay, longer than usual, at the beginning of each new page, but then it fills in fairly quickly. Here's some more details about it performance, including comparison to Verizon and T-Mobile's similar offerings.
What are you paying for this?
Posted by: Erik at February 2, 2004 07:28 PM$74.95/month (tax-deductible for me).
$249 for the card, with a possible $100 rebate, I still have to call about that, it's confusing. The store said there wasn't one, but all the ads for the service say there is one. There is also a 30-day no-risk period, where you can return the card and get out of the contract for just the price of the 1st month. After that you are locked into a one-year contract with a $175 cancellation fee if you want to end before that. The coverage map is pretty wide, basically medium-sized blobs all across the country centered around big cities. Probably no chance of any coverage in most smaller places.
BTW Verizon's service is almost identically priced and seems like it might have slightly better performance, especially in the latency area. T-Mobile's is apparently MUCH slower, but also about half the price. Plus I've heard their coverage map is not as good.
Posted by: Chris Marstall at February 2, 2004 07:54 PM