I wouldn’t have made it through the storm without my Sprint mobile broadband card.  As of some time last month, Sprint has finally turned on broadband service in the Harrisburg area.  This officially gives us three carriers providing true wireless broadband:  AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless.  If you feel limited by having to hop around looking for free WiFi (or don’t like the idea of paying $10 / day at Starbucks), you should know that we finally — really — have actual broadband speeds available over the air, with unlimited service starting at $49.99 (Sprint) per month.  And it rocks.

Choosing which of the three providers to go with can be difficult.  Many people (including, frankly, most employees of the carriers themselves) are clueless about wireless data.  The carriers have long offered complicated mashups of confusing plans using terms like “broadband-like” and per-kilobyte pricing.  If you have ever shopped for and/or tried wireless data in the past, take another look.  Each carrier offers speeds of around 1.0 - 2.0 mb/s within the service area.

Sprint is currently the least expensive provider at $49.99 / month. In fact, if you already have voice service through Sprint, you can add unlimited data to your plan for $39.99 / month. Sprint has the largest broadband coverage area nationwide, and is currently undergoing a very aggressive expansion to boot. Unfortunately, their Harrisburg-area coverage is fairly limited at the moment. Harrisburg city, Camp Hill, Mechanicsburg, and points south are well-covered; anything else falls back to 144k. Sprint uses technology called EVDO rev.A to provide broadband service, giving typical speeds of around 1.5m (standard DSL speed) bursting up to 2.8m.

AT&T is the only other provider to offer unlimited service, and is the medium-priced carrier at $59.99 / month. AT&T’s broadband coverage area, however, is awful (blue areas are broadband). Their current national coverage is about three years behind that of Sprint or Verizon Wireless. When you leave the broadband area, you’ll fall back to EDGE, which runs around 144k. AT&T uses UMTS to provide broadband service, with speeds nearly identical to that of EVDO rev.A.

Verizon Wireless just recently cut their rates by a substantial amount, bringing their broadband service to $59.99 per month. They also have the most local broadband coverage by a wide margin, and are in second place nationwide. However, after an embarrassing lawsuit, Verizon Wireless removed the word “unlimited” from their data plan, preferring to call it “for Internet access”. If you transfer more than 5gb in one month — a very, very easy accomplishment with casual usage — your service may get interrupted, disconnected, or worse. For this reason, I can’t recommend Verizon Wireless to anyone. Verizon Wireless also uses EVDO rev.A, making this the largest and most popular broadband data protocol in the US.

I have used both EVDO rev.A (Sprint / VZW) and UMTS (AT&T) devices at length. They all get the job done; they will all surf the web, fetch emails, and more. The big difference is in the consistency of the speed and the network lag. UMTS and EDGE (AT&T) have a notable amount of lag (the time between when you tell your connection to do something and it actually does it).  We’re not just talking a few milliseconds here and there; pages consistently took 5 - 30 seconds longer to load than they did on the EVDO rev.A networks, and using network-intensive applications like streaming media or SSH were virtually impossible.  The EVDO rev.A networks were able to sustain higher speeds for longer periods of time. Downloading decent-quality videos (ie, non-YouTube) and audio tended to require a lot of patience on UMTS, while EVDO was more like being on my cable modem at home.

Since I can’t recommend VZW because of their draconian network limitations, my vote goes to Sprint. AT&T is a worthy competitor, but given Sprint’s larger national footprint, it doesn’t make sense to lose your connection just because you’re in Lancaster, York, Carlisle, or Lebanon. Sprint is also currently in an accelerated network growth period to avoid losing ground to VZW, while AT&T seems to be stuck in second gear. If I had to bet a two-year contract on who will fill in the local nooks and crannies first, I’d put my money on Sprint.

There is so much you can do with a wireless broadband card that I can’t even begin to cover them in-depth here.  Suffice to say my Sprint USB modem was the best $49 I’ve spent in a long time.  As always, feel free to contact me with any wireless questions you may have, and I’ll put my industry experience to use by giving out straight answers.

And Met-Ed sucks.