Comment "Abuse of bandwidth" and huge fines (Score 2, Informative) 461
The other thing you need to carefully consider before getting a CDMA card/account is what you want to use itt for. I worked in Customer Service for a large national provider, and the absolute worst calls to get were people who thought that an "unlimited data transfer" account allowed them to do everything they would do on a broadband account.
Well, check that EULA, cowboy, because in a lot of cases (heck, I even found one in my comcast cable EULA) there's a special "appropriate use" or "bandwidth abuse" clause that will allow them to slap you with huge, I mean thousands of dollars in some cases that I saw, if you do things like p2p or streaming video.
The other problem is that the provider, in every case that I've seen, won't tell you where the threshold is that unlimited is no longer really unlimited. It's based off some calculated cost of carrying your subscription that the corporate office usually doesn't even share with their CS folks, and if they do happen to know, they won't share it with you the customer for fear of disciplinary action. Once you pass that nebulous line, your account is shut off and any data transfer you got in before they noticed and shut you off (nope, it's not even an automated process)is charged to you to the tune of something around $0.25 a K. We had one college student run Kazaa or something similar on her CDMA connection for month, doing megabyte after megabyte over the limit, and she, no joke, ended up with a bill in the neighborhood of $23,000.
In any event, speeds on our network, which were heavily connection-strength dependent, ran an average of probably 120k, and were effectively faster for html traffic with the provided compression software. It seemed like an ok tech for mobile professionals of the sort who don't always have time to go to a hotspot to send and receive e-mail, but I would recommend it to very few people outside that rarefied set.
Well, check that EULA, cowboy, because in a lot of cases (heck, I even found one in my comcast cable EULA) there's a special "appropriate use" or "bandwidth abuse" clause that will allow them to slap you with huge, I mean thousands of dollars in some cases that I saw, if you do things like p2p or streaming video.
The other problem is that the provider, in every case that I've seen, won't tell you where the threshold is that unlimited is no longer really unlimited. It's based off some calculated cost of carrying your subscription that the corporate office usually doesn't even share with their CS folks, and if they do happen to know, they won't share it with you the customer for fear of disciplinary action. Once you pass that nebulous line, your account is shut off and any data transfer you got in before they noticed and shut you off (nope, it's not even an automated process)is charged to you to the tune of something around $0.25 a K. We had one college student run Kazaa or something similar on her CDMA connection for month, doing megabyte after megabyte over the limit, and she, no joke, ended up with a bill in the neighborhood of $23,000.
In any event, speeds on our network, which were heavily connection-strength dependent, ran an average of probably 120k, and were effectively faster for html traffic with the provided compression software. It seemed like an ok tech for mobile professionals of the sort who don't always have time to go to a hotspot to send and receive e-mail, but I would recommend it to very few people outside that rarefied set.
