Novatel Wireless is introducing a mobile router with cellular backbone called the MiFi 2200. It will be available through Verizon Wireless starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). David Pogue of the NY Times has a review:
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.
In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)
This gizmo is a full-blown wireless router with full-blown configuration controls. If you type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser’s address bar — a trick well known to network gurus — the MiFi’s settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password or the wireless network name, limiting access to specific computers, turning on port forwarding (don’t ask).
An internal antenna is nice. But the $270 cost is high, the lack of USB is limiting, and the service is expensive and slow (compared to WiMAX in Portland).
I bought my Cradlepoint PHS300 WiFi Hotspot for $139 through Clear in Portland (with no contract requirements). I take it all over the city. It works.
Now Clear is offering a two for one package. You can get both unlimited Home Internet and a second Mobile Internet account for just $5 more a month more. In Portland you can get two WiMAX clients (mobile and residential) with unlimited 4 Mbps for $55/month. That’s a lot better deal than one Verizon MiFI access point ($270) with limited 1 Mbps service for $60/month with a 2-year contract.
Of course you have to deal with Clear’s customer service. When I swapped my residential service for Mobile service, the company billed me for both accounts even after I told them to close out the residential service. The sales representative sold me on unlimited mobile service for $40/month (for the first 6 months), then $50/month. But my bill shows the standard unlimited rate of $50/month. When I called about it yesterday, Clear customer service flatly refused to honor the $40/month price.
Buyer beware. Clear’s sales thrust is centered on commissions and their customer service (in my case) was unresponsive to misrepresentation by their sales representatives.
Right now I’m using only one USB WiMAX client for both residential use and mobile use. I pull it out of the desktop computer (or AC-powered Cradlepoint MBR 1000) and put it in a laptop (or battery-powered Cradlepoint hotspot), when I’m going somewhere. It’s not as reliable as my AC residential WiMAX modem was, but I find that the USB WiMAX client is good enough.
I planned to more thoroughly test out Mobile WiMAX around Portland, but it’s been raining steadily here for what seems like weeks, and I’ve been sticking close to home.
Here’s an April 8th speed test (above), using my Clear WiMAX USB client sitting by my window and running straight into my desktop computer. I live in the downtown core of Portland, Oregon.
Clearwire expects to launch mobile WiMax in eight more US markets in 2009, spending between $1.5 billion and $1.9 billion on the deployments. Clearwire will deploy new networks in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas/Ft. Worth this year and convert its fixed wireless Seattle, Honolulu, and Charlotte networks to mobile WiMax in 2009. The CLEAR Innovation Network will launch in Silicon Valley this summer.
Related Dailywireless articles include; Emergency Hot Spot, Clearwire Sued Over Early Termination Fees, Eye-Fi’s 4 GB Card & Clear Mobile Hotspot, Sprint’s WiMAX Rollout, CradlePoint: Mobile WiFi/WiMAX Hot Spots,
