AT&T is running adverts for a USB stick. Plug it into a laptop, and you get internet access anywhere there is a signal, no WiFi hotspot required, no hotel paying eleven dollars a night for a connection that drops every twenty minutes. That is the pitch, and for the first time it is roughly true rather than aspirational.
The technology making it true is HSPA, the upgrade path sitting on top of the 3G networks carriers spent the last few years building out mostly for voice. Coverage in the cities that matter is now good enough that a laptop with one of these cards gets something close to entry-level DSL speeds, which is a real change from eighteen months ago, when 3G data meant a spinner and a prayer.
Here is what I keep coming back to: the device getting the loudest press coverage in the industry right now cannot do any of this. The iPhone launched on EDGE, which was already the slow option in 2007, and it is still on EDGE. Apple’s own users are the ones stuck refreshing a page over a connection slower than what AT&T is now advertising to laptop owners as a breakthrough.
I do not think that is an oversight. I think Apple made a real tradeoff on battery life and radio power draw for the first version, and the rumor mill has been saying a 3G model is coming for months now, which tells you Apple knows exactly what it is giving up.
What nobody has solved yet is the pricing, and this is where the laptop pitch falls apart a little. Carriers still have not settled on whether mobile broadband is unlimited or metered, the overage charges are punitive when they exist, and most people signing a two-year contract for a USB stick have no real sense of what five gigabytes a month feels like until the bill arrives.
Enterprise buyers do not care about any of that because someone else is expensing it. Everyone else is going to keep doing the mental math on whether this is worth it over the hotel WiFi they were already annoyed about, and for now I think the hotel WiFi still wins on price even when it loses on everything else.