[ale] Wireless Broadband

[Mike Harrison]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, Andrew Grieser wrote:

> Jim,
>
> Thanks for the response, In looking around I've actually been surprised 
> at the number of cards that seem to "just work".
>
> Unfortunately, as I dig farther into this, it looks like the service 
> plans aren't quite what I was expecting. The typical TOS I've found is 
> that the service can only be used for "simple" web viewing and email. 
> Meaning no streaming video (youtube etc), no ssh, no irc etc. They are 
> pretty explicit that your service will be terminated for any violation 
> of this. Have you run into any issues with this?

I've been blown away by the Verizon USB727 with the Airprime driver in 
Ubuntu. We move it between several different Ubuntu laptops used by sales 
droids and it just works. I've got it working on the laptop and use it for 
SSH and various other applications/protocols all the time. A little magic 
with iptables and "dnsmasq" on the laptop, and it makes a great mobile 
WiFi access point, as well as via local ethernet allows others to get
full net access. We're paying $60/month for a high usage plan, and have 
not had any issues. No, we aren't doing any streaming video over it
and are probably way under our cap/limit for the plan, but it seems to be
wide open access. Note: Hard to do SMTP sending e-mail from their IP's, I 
bounce outbound SMTP off of one of our servers at work.

I consistently see bursts of 800kbps.. and with decent signal, SSH is very 
usable (low latency).