Forgive me for leaving my usual bloggy fare, for a short note on technological matters.
I live in some kind of broadband dead zone. Literally for years, my wife and I have been waiting for additional broadband Internet options to arrive in our Pueblo neighborhood. At first, I thought a local startup would reach us first, but they didn’t serve Macs. When their system became Mac compatible, I found out that their signal was too weak to reach our neighborhood. Qwest, which advertises its broadband services all over Colorado, does not reach our neighborhood either. A couple of days before Christmas, they actually left a flier on our door saying that we could get Internet through them now, but that turned out to be a sick joke.
The reason I’ve been so keen to switch is that to our knowledge we have had only one remotely affordable broadband Internet choice: Comcast through a cable. It costs $60/month. When I found out the price was going up to $66/month I knew it was time to do some more research on this. After all, it’s not 1999 anymore.
On New Year’s Day, my brother-in-law gave us the solution to our problem: A mobile hotspot from Sprint. Thanks to the advanced nature of my wife’s phone, we can now use it for our broadband Internet service. It reaches everywhere in the house and is just as fast as what we had before. It adds $20/month to the phone bill, and requires a $25 device for Laura’s Laura’s old Mac to pick up wireless, but the overall savings each month are absolutely extraordinary. First there’s the fact that I can cancel the Comcast bill, plus we won’t have to use the AT&T account that goes with our new iPad. Sure, I can only surf the web and write blog posts when my wife is home. Considering the magnitude of these cost savings, I think I can live with that.
If you’re paying too much for your home Internet, you really ought to check with your mobile phone company to see if this will work for you too.
More or Less Bunk 
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