Friday, December 3, 2010

Verizon Wireless Rolls Out 4G

So on Sunday Verizon Wireless is rolling out its 4G network to 38 select cities. You can go to: www.verizonwireless.com/4Glte, to see if your area will be covered. There seems to be a problem with the link at the moment though.
Initially 4G will only be available for laptops. Verizon's line of 4G smartphones will be revealed next month.
I'm totally looking forward to this. 4G is supposed to be 10x faster than 3G.
3G on my Samsung Alias 2 is pretty good. It's faster than my dial up. I live in a rural area, so dial up and satellite are my only options. At least I thought they were my only options until I saw an ad for AT&T's usb modem. I can use that modem to hop on AT&T's cell phone network with my laptop. Verizon Wireless has a similar modem. I would probably stick with Verizon. The plan I would choose runs about $60 per month. My dial up plan at toast.net is about $10 per month. I haven't been ready to spend that extra $50 a month, but with the 4G network I think I may be ready. The 4G plan is also cheaper than the 3G. The 4G plan is $50 a month for 5 gig of bandwith or $80 for 10 gig. Toast.net is not bad, but downloading and uploading anything larger than a few meg is painful. With 4G, you can download a 2 hour movie in 5 minutes. Watching videos and listening to music online with dial up is extremely painful. My favorite channel, SoapNet, will be no longer in 2012, so I may end up having to watch my soaps online.
When my cell phone contract is up a year from now, I think I'm also going to go for a smartphone, maybe a Droid. We'll see what's available at that point.

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