Wednesday, September 23, 2009

NYT: A Wi-Fi Alternative When the Network Gets Clogged

I need MiFi! For both my at&t blackberry and for my ipod touch!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=444050&f=24&p=3

I found JiWire's free Wi-Fi Finder iPhone app particularly useful. The software sniffs out your location and offers a list of nearby hot spots, free and paid. If you're a customer of one of the big Wi-Fi networks, like iPass, Boingo or AT&T, the app will tell you where to find those.

AT&T says its free Wi-Fi initiative isn't a response to a recent avalanche of complaints from iPhone users that they cannot connect via 3G. Still, Jeff Bradley, the company's senior vice president of devices, said that if more AT&T users shifted to Wi-Fi, the performance of the 3G network should improve.

also, "Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/technology/personaltech/07pogue.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

The Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.

The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.


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