T&T: Air Card Wirless Router Search

[Jeffrey Siegel]

>> I would expect the cellular carriers to attempt to stop
>> the ability for multiple computers to share a single 
>> cellular connection in the future.
>>

> ...is that speculation based on industry knowledge or a healthy
> suspicion of corporate bean counter mentality?
> 

As wireless access expands, it starts adding real costs to the cellular
providers or else everyone's performance decreases (or gets terminated).
Because of this, all of the providers have started adding new provisions in
the agreement that you agree to but never read.  For example, here are a
couple of goodies from Verizon's data card agreement (although I'm not
picking on them - all of them are doing this):

- "NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess is for individual use only"

- "While most common uses for Internet are permitted by your Data Plan,
there are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and
interference with the network. These are not uses intended by our Data
Access plans and are therefore prohibited."

- "If usage exceeds 5 GB per line during any billing period, we reserve the
right to reduce throughput speeds of any application that would otherwise
exceed such speed to a maximum of approximately 200 Kbps. These speeds are
subject to change, in our reasonable discretion, in order to address network
issues."

- "Accordingly, we reserve the right to deny, modify or terminate service,
without notice, to anyone we believe is using Data Plans or Features in any
manner that adversely impacts our network or service levels, and we also
reserve the right to terminate service upon expiration of the Customer
Agreement term."


This is from Verizon's 12/21/07 agreement.

The first thing that will start happening is that applications like Skype
will stop working over unlimited data plans.  They can do that very easily
and I've read about it happening already in some locations.  It wouldn't be
hard for them to limit network use to only a single computer if they wanted
to.


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Jeffrey Siegel
M/V aCappella
DeFever 53PH
W1ACA/WDB4350
Castine, Maine

www.activecaptain.com
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