Should I dump my wired ISP for cellular broadband?

Well, I certainly feel your pain. My unlimited data plan costs me an
additional $40 per month on top of my regular cellphone charges. Add to that
the roughly $50 per month I pay for the DSL into my home, and it definitely
adds up.

Now, granted, in my case it’s my business, and I have strong reasons for
needing both.

But even if I didn’t, you wouldn’t see me dumping the hardwired DSL just
yet.

There are a some issues that crop up if you were to rely on cellular
broadband as your sole source of connectivity.

Speed Even for EVDO, which is the current “latest,
greatest, sexiest” technology for cellular data transmission, speed isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be. I’m hearing various reports from people using EVDO that,
while they occasionally get near the quoted max transmission rates, it’s often
far less. Apparently the actual throughput is very location
specific. That makes sense to me, as I would expect it to be very dependant on
the strength of the cellular signal. Just at a gut level, it seems that each
faster technology that comes along is correspondingly more sensitive to signal
quality.

Since you already have the phone, my advice there is to try it. Set up where
you think you’ll be using things, and see if the speed matches your
expectations. My guess is that, moving from a cable service, you may be
seriously disappointed.

“All you can eat?” I have heard rumors that,
particularly with the EVDO services, if you use too much of your unlimited data
plan, you may be charged extra. What? That’s what I said… it implies that
your unlimited data plan may, in fact, not be truly “unlimited” at all. If you
suddenly move all your work to that cellular connection, you could blow through
whatever that ceiling is pretty quickly.

My advice here is to do the research. Do not rely on in-store
salespeople for this. Call the service provider, scan the discussion boards on
the internet, and see what’s really happening. I’m not saying that it
will happen, because I’ve not seen any official statements, but if true, you
could be in for a rude surprise.

Networking Using your cell phone for connectivity is
something typically designed to be done with a single computer. It is possible,
using Internet Connection Sharing, to share that connection with other
computers on a local area network, but it’s a different set up, and requires
that one computer be on at all times any of the others might want to access the
internet.

Dropped Calls You’ll need some way to reestablish dropped
calls. Data calls are occasionally dropped, just like voice. When that happens
to me, I have to reach over to my Treo and push a couple of buttons to
reestablish the call – it’s not something I can do from my laptop’s
keyboard.

My recommendation is to rely on cellular as your sole provider only if
you have no other choice. And really research the implications, should you go
that route.