3G feels like it's been with us for quite a while. First came the hype, then the bubble, then the Valley of Death. But it has finally crossed the divide and made it to Shipping Product in America.
I took the plunge with Verizon's 3G program, called Broadband Access. Essentially, you buy a PC card for your laptop ($99) and subscribe to the service ($59.99 monthly). Run through the painless install on the provided CD, and you're online. What you get is comparable to a DSL connection: 400-700kbps, with claimed top speeds around 2Mbps. The first couple of hours, I monitored the connection speed and these seem to be about what I'm getting. But after the first day, I stopped measuring because the bottome line is that Verizon is selling what so many of us have needed for so long: easy broadband access from anywhere.
I will grant that $60/month is a bit steep for an Internet connection. It's more than my faster cable connection at home, and more than the (also faster) T-Mobile Wi-Fi I use on the road. But I'll be dropping the T-Mobile Wi-Fi shortly since the 3G connection doesn't require me to go to a hotspot. And since I travel a great deal, I spend a ton of money on broadband access from hotels ($9.95/day at the Marriott, for instance). That reign of terror has finally ended -- the Verizon card works in most major metro areas in the U.S. They've hit critical mass, and I can project that the expansion of 3G will look like the rollout of digital phone service, only it will happen faster.
As a sidenote, Sprint also appears to have launched a 3G data offering, and Cingular is rumored to be launching theirs soon. But given the quality of their voice networks, why bother?
It's good to find out that the U.S. is finally starting to catch up on this whole "Internet" thing.
I heard that a number of peole have dropped the verizon service, saying that it's barely faster than dialup. Any reason why results might vary by computer, geography?
Posted by: Mak | November 15, 2005 at 07:50 PM
I heard that a number of peole have dropped the verizon service, saying that it's barely faster than dialup. Any reason why results might vary by computer, geography?
Posted by: Mak | November 15, 2005 at 07:51 PM