AT&T MiFi

Since I don't believe I covered this earlier, a Mi-Fi is basically a portable, battery operated device for establishing a private wi-fi network (if wi-fi is over your head you'll need to figure that out on your own, but basically it is a wireless way to connect to the internet).  The Mi-Fi basically gets access to the internet by establishing a connection to a cellular phone network (in our case, AT&T's network).  So anywhere that we have coverage in AT&T's network, we'll also be able to connect to the internet to stay in touch, shop, etc.  The cost of this service is based upon how much data gets passed through the cellular network while we are online.

Alea and I had planned to cut the cord on our landline phone and internet connections soon after acquiring our AT&T MiFi device a few weeks ago.  The salespeople at AT&T assured us that 5GB of data per month should be adequate for us, as long as we weren't e-mailing lots of large photos or viewing lots of YouTube videos.  It turns out that was a load of BS.

While we did cut the cord on our landline phone (the number of which we transferred to Alea's new cell phone), it has become necessary to maintain our CenturyLink wired internet for a while longer, as blogging, shopping for supplies and planning parts of our itinerary could easily have gobbled up at least twice as much data as our plan allowed.  That should be less of an issue once we're traveling, though we'll probably need, at least on occasion, to plan big data usages for times when we have access to free wifi at Starbucks or McDonalds.

We tried a number of things to reign in our data usage before temporarily opting to maintain our wired internet connection:

1. Our Chrome browsers have a data saver option (still being beta tested) that reduces data usage by about 15%, effectively giving us an extra five free days of data per month.  
2. We changed our Gmail settings so that images embedded in the e-mails are not automatically downloaded.  
3. We stopped reading the newspaper online for a few days to see what impact that made.
4. We changed the settings in our Moto G phones so that we don't automatically back up our photos to Google Drive (instead, we now manually specify when to backup, based upon when we are on free wifi).
5. I'll likely plan on drafting blog posts in Google Docs while offline, and then cut-and-paste them into Blogger when online.
6. And we've basically looked for any other way to minimize our data footprint.

Still, with all that, if I shopped a bit too long on Amazon.com or eBay, or spent an afternoon researching a topic of interest, we'd be using data at a clip that would exceed our 5 GB monthly data allocation.  

We had scouted around for mobile internet solutions and reluctantly got into a two year contract with AT&T, where we get 5 GB of data for $50 per month (with an additional $10 per GB for any overage), as that allowed us to avoid the up front cost of the MiFi device (which would have been $150).  We visited the local AT&T store to talk with a salesperson, since we wanted to be clear about the advertised free access to AT&T's "nationwide WiFi network."  That is basically all of the McDonalds and Starbucks, plus some smaller franchises and independent shops.  Since WiFi is already free in those places, we presumed that going there with our MiFi would mean we'd have a secure connection, bypassing, for instance, the McDonald's portal that you go through to access their WiFi.  We were assured that is indeed the way the system works.  I tried that out this afternoon, and it turns out that is NOT the case (no surprise that two different salesmen would tell us what they think we wanted to hear, rather than giving us factual information).

But it is pretty cheesy that AT&T would advertise "access to their free nationwide wi-fi network," when in fact it is a network that is paid for by subscribing businesses, and it is those businesses (and not AT&T) who provide it for free!

I've never been a big fan of AT&T, but we chose them as the least of the known evils and because their cell coverage is better than most of the cheaper options.  Of course they quickly reinforced my lack of faith in them when we received an e-mail notification of our first bill, which they sent to us in VIDEO format, thoughtfully telling us that we'd be using part of our data allocation to view the damn thing!  Needless to say, this served to further validate my mistrust of established telecoms (I'll look forward to dumping them someday when a better option comes along!).  With a little extra effort, it was possible to view an html version of the bill, with minimal impact on our data usage.

In attempting to narrow down our mobile internet choices, one thing we had read is that not everyone counts data the same way.  I have a sneaking suspicion that there's probably some sort of data rounding going on that is bumping our data usage higher than it should be.  For instance, data transmissions are often rounded up, but different services round by different amounts.  You can imagine the difference of one provider rounding up to the nearest 10KB, while another rounds to the nearest 100KB.  The data allocation for the latter would be used up much more quickly.  Given that AT&T wants to jack up the data usage of their customers by sending out video bills, I wouldn't be surprised if their data rounding is less in our favor than some of their competitors.

But the Mi-Fi should function well for what we need it for most often - the ability to access the internet on an almost daily basis to check mail and to update the blog.  If we need to do extended searches for a replacement part or other necessity, we'll likely plan that around a visit to someplace with free wi-fi, unless we've got lots of data left on that month's allocation.  But we'll bookmark intended purchases and order them later, when we have our own secure Mi-Fi connection.

ADDENDUM (15 Aug 2015)
Now that we've been using this MiFi for a while now, I thought that I'd point out that not everywhere that we have a good cell signal has an internet connection.  And we've had better luck finding signals as we cycle through the NW part of the US skirting the Canadian border than we had anticipated.  We've also found that Ancestry.com is a bit of a data hog, as we can very easily use double our daily data allotment with just some casual usage.