For the past four years I have had the privilege of a free internet connection shared from a corporate site next door to me where I used to work. It has been and in fact still is good and I intend to keep using it. However in order to supplement it and work around some of its limitations I am now planning to sign up for Skinny Wireless 4G Broadband. This has only recently become available in my area and appears to be limited to the Spark network (not Vodafone).
Skinny have a few plans starting with $39 for 60 GB of data with a downlink speed around 36Mbps and uplink 10Mbps. This is slow by fibre standards but a lot faster than my throttled 1Mbps Wifi connection from next door. According to a current deal they will give the first month free but you have to pay for the modem which costs $99, however their overall rates are the cheapest – Vodafone where available starts at $53 (albeit for 120GB which Skinny charges $49 for) whilst Spark starts at $65 for 60 GB but they don’t charge you for the modem. So the first month would cost $99 and each month thereafter $39.
Up until now when I have needed an independent connection I have used either a laptop or a Raspberry Pi tethered to my mobile phone. The problem is that these mobile data connections are throttled quite severely during busy times (i.e. daytime) and the Pi is too slow to manage very much without grinding to a halt. Under the new arrangement I will have a regular computer that gets its internet exclusively from the wireless modem but will still be connected to the internal network as well except that it will have a different default gateway from the rest so that it won’t connect to the corporate internet. Its internal network connection will generally be used just for file transfers and remote access.
Of course now there is the question of do I need my relatively expensive mobile plan with its large amount of data, and in reality I don’t. However incorporated into that plan is two free tablet shares that let me use my tablet and second phone on the same data connection without an additional cost. So that is the reason I will probably stick with my current mobile plan but it is tempting to think I could switch to a cheaper prepay plan if I was willing to drop the tablet shares. One day perhaps Vodafone will stop letting me use my current plan but they are probably doing alright on it for now as it is pretty rare for me to use anything like my full data allocation and it will be even less likely with the wireless broadband installed. This is a backup to the corporate connection which is still going to be used for the rest of my needs.