[TriLUG] OT: Wireless Hotspot weekly rental?

[P L Charles Fischer]

I needed two weeks of Internet access at my mother's house in Kentucky 
early this month.  After a bit of research I went with Virgin Mobile.  I 
got a MiFi hotspot and paid $50 for a month of unlimited* access.  When 
it worked I got about 1mbps of download and about 0.2mbps of upload.  
Not too bad.  The problem was it went down twice in the two weeks.  Once 
was a broad outage that lasted about 6 hours.  The other happened when 
Virgin Mobile turned me off for over use.  A glitch in their system said 
I had used 4,194,304 megabytes in about a week.  The first help desk 
person did not catch the problem, so after saying it would all be fixed 
in 4 hours (network update time), it was still not working.  The next 
help desk person did find the problem and reset my account to zero bytes 
transferred.  Four hours later I had Internet.

On the plus side, the MiFi plus my Xoom made for a good GPS.  The speed 
was good enough to do one Internet task at a time (do not do a software 
update while trying to surf the web).  It beat finding public hot spots 
by a mile (while 2.5 miles from my mom's house).

In summary the MiFi hotspot worked well.  I think I may have gotten 
unlucky about the dropped service.  I was about to return it, but have 
decided to keep it.

Later,
Charles Fischer

* unlimited is not really true.  It is unlimited for the first 2.5GB.  
After that you get throttled to about one fourth speed.


On 7/15/11 9:40 AM, Igor Partola wrote:
> This may be more permanent than you want, but Virgin Mobile has some nice
> pre-paid options. You get to pay monthly though.
>
> Igor
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Carl Crider<c.crider at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> The 15 day trial would be my suggestion as well. I've had plenty of
>> luck working in a couple of Wilmington coffee shops.
>> A friend of mine use Day Pass (I didn't Google to be sure of the name)
>> wifi rental for a recent bike trip.
>>
>> If you are actually heading up and out to the OBX, there's a short
>> list of free spots here:
>> http://therealouterbanks.com/outer-banks-free-wi-fi-2.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Len Boyle<Len.Boyle at sas.com>  wrote:
>>> You could sign up for att or Verizon broadband support which used to come
>> with a 15 day trial.
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
>> Behalf Of Chris Merrill
>>> Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 9:10 AM
>>> To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
>>> Subject: [TriLUG] OT: Wireless Hotspot weekly rental?
>>>
>>> I'm soon heading to Wilmington (Wrightsville Beach) for a week for a
>> family vacation. The place we are staying does not have internet access  :O
>> Needless to say, I had no part in selecting the location.
>>> Does anyone know of mobile internet providers that handle short-term
>> leases in the Wilmington area?  If anyone can share their experience with
>> these in the OBX, that would help as well.
>>> My other option is to root my Droid and use that.  This IS the excuse
>> I've been looking for to root it, but I'm not sure if I have time to get it
>> done before now and next Friday...and I don't know kind of range to expect
>> from the Droid as a hotspot.
>>> TIA!
>>> Chris
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -
>>> Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
>>> chris at webperformance.com                |  http://webperformance.com
>>> 919-433-1762                            |  919-845-7601
>>>
>>> Web Performance: Website Load Testing Software&  Services
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -
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