Thin Pipe, Part 3: MIFI, The Emergency Internet Solution

So this internet starvation stuff has been going on a lot longer than just this year. At some point I will post an entry talking about the good old bad old days, of Satellite Internet services, ISDN, extra phone lines and slower-than-most dialup. At one point I decided to try out using a cellular modem to get internet, it was back at the dawn of 3G service. I figured I would not get 3G, but should at least get the Verizon EDGE network and get some service. I ordered the modem, service, it came a few days later. Plugged it in. No signal. Nothing. I should mention that in addition to being an internet black hole, our part of town is also a cellular black hole as well. People come to visit from metro areas with their Sprint or Nextel or whatever works in the city phones and they get zero bars, all the time. About the only thing that does work for phones is Verizon, owing to their good rural coverage. But it didn't work back then for internet, so I had to return everything and cancel my contract.

So it was with quite a measure of desperation that five years later (after no internet for a week), I headed over to my local Verizon Wireless Zone to pick up another cellular modem. Verizon is in the process of rolling out their 4G LTE Network , but only in "select areas", which is of course code for no-effing-way-it-will-be-near-my-house. Still the 3G service, if I could now get it, was supposedly capable of delivering between 500k bps and 1 Mbps, which for a guy without any internet, sounded just fine. I was hopeful it would work this time, because Verizon put a tower not too far away (neighboring town) and the reception had improved quite a bit since my last attempt.

After studying the various modem and plan options, I decided on the Verizon MIFI 2200 personal hot spot. This sounds like some sort of thing you might be embarrassed to have your parents find on your night stand, but actually its a pretty cool little gizmo, it receives 3G cellular data and then provides a WIFI hot spot that allows up to 5 devices to connect wirelessly to it. Why only five? My best guess is that it's too puny to effectively route more connections than that. This thing is truly tiny. Imagine taking you iPhone, cutting off the top 25%, painting the rest jet black. That's the form factor. Plug it in anywhere, or you can run it on battery if you want to take it with.

I was not sure if this would work, and if it did work, how long I would actually need to use it. I was still hoping that we would have a guy on site after the long weekend, cheerfully connecting up a new relay modem. So I made sure there was a month-to-month plan available with Verizon's 3G data service. All of the choices available are bandwidth-capped, the unlimited bandwidth plans for smart phones were abandoned by Verizon a few days before I got my modem. (grrr...)

The new plans are either 75MB/month for $10... good luck with that after you access your first email message or two. then 2GB/month for $30, 5GB/month for $50, and 10GB/month for $80.

OK I know what all you FiOS guys are doing, rolling your eyes. What a ripoff - Who would pay it? The answer is, you would. If internet access was important to you. If you had no other choice. I was not sure how long I'd be out, but I didn't want to have to shut it off before my service was restored, so I chose the 10GB/month plan and paid the $80, on top of the MIFI modem cost and activation. A couple hundred bucks. But there was the hope I would not be spending another weekend staring at the red blinking light at the top of the tree, hoping it would turn green (see Issue #1).

Long story short, took it home, plugged it in, wrestled with Verizon's horrible VZaccess manager software install, and boom, it magically came online. Seems decent I thought, browsing some web pages. Next stop, speedtest.net - initially I came in with about 600 K bps. Not bad. Played with the position of the little black box. It has no external antenna, so just rotating and moving it around until the bar meter on the WIFI web server page showed 4 bars. Reran tests, and I was amazed to see 1.72 Mbps down / 1.86 Mbps up at the peak! That was faster than the internet ever went in my house, a new high-water mark. Faster than even some of my lower-priced DSL friends who have 1.5 Mbps service. My internet woes are frequently the butt of many a joke at work, and for once I would not be the slowest kid on the block.

Surf's Up!

I handed out the MIFI WIFI password to the family. They took to it like men who had been crawling through the desert finally reaching a watering hole, greedily updating their facebook walls and reading reddit pages and email. iPads, laptops, desktops, it did not take long for all five slots on the MIFI router to fill up. Soon we were kicking off one machine to get another on. "The average home has four internet connected devices" the commercial on TV cheerfully says. We have like a dozen or more.

It got ugly, I tried to patch the MIFI router to my regular router using a crossover cable and configuring the router as a bridge, but the MIFI router was still was handing out DHCP addresses and stopping after handing out five. After knocking out our service four or five times while experimenting, I gave up, and resigned myself to having to manage which five things got to drink from the great MIFI internet stream.

Things settled out by the end of the weekend, and I became more relaxed about hounding our new internet company for repair service, I could probably go a good part of the month using the MIFI 10GB allowance. Let them sort out their transition problems, I figured, I want to stay on their good side. I resisted calling them Tuesday when they reopened, we surfed happily on our 3G cellular connection. I bragged to my coworkers about my new internet solution, and how speedy and cool the MIFI modem was.

"How much bandwidth are you allowed?" they asked.

"10GB an month," I replied. My coworker frowned.

"10GB? Wow, when I update my PS3 software, it's usually like a 7GB update. Wouldn't take long to use 10GB!"

When I got home, I decided to check on our usage. We had sucked down 3GB of our 10GB already, after like 2 days. I freaked out a little.

"Kids, have you been watching videos on the internet??"

I had tried to discourage this with the little talk about our new, temporary internet service. They said they had watched a few, but I could not see that sucking down 3GB. Then I remembered auto update, and how our machines probably had been off the net for over a week, and sure enough they had all decided to go download patches and updates and all sorts of stuff.

Then proceeded the turning-off of updates, the talk about watching videos, the disconnecting of devices when not using them, and so forth. Then I read in the fine print on the WIFI page, something about "usage statistics do not include overhead and other factors, log in to Verizon VZaccess to get accurate usage info". I started to freak out again, expecting it to be an even larger number.. did we just burn through 5GB in like 3 days?? When I went to the "official" statistics though, it reported that I had only used 1.5GB. Whah...? Not sure how that works, but if that is the official metric, I am pretty relieved.

But my sense of relaxation regarding not bothering our internet company had evaporated. I decided not to let them have a whole week of peace, I would need to ramp up operation pester a bit earlier. But not before a little diversion into one of my favorite masochistic passtimes... bugging the telcom companies about my service.

Next Time: The Quixotic Quest for DSL