Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 17 July 2008 16:27
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
For individuals, the speed of a 3.5G wireless broadband service won’t be too much of an issue. It still might not be as fast as ADSL or cable but in the event of any outages you will have a backup. Plus if you run a business from home or like the option of being connected when out and about, you can use your wireless connection to give you "anywhere" connectivity.
Those on 3 Mobile with an X-Series compatible phone can also get 500MB of data for $20 per month, 1GB of data for $30 per month or 2GB of data for $40 per month.
You can connect your phone direct to your desktop or notebook computer, connected via USB cable or Bluetooth, and get connected that way.
Other providers, namely Vodafone, Optus and Telstra also have data packages through their mobile phones but generally charge a lot more for data than 3 Mobile do.
Usually these plans also require you to sign up for 24 months at a fixed rate, something that’s annoying as prices will inevitably fall, or if they don’t fall, the amount of download you’ll get will rise for the money - but if you're locked into a 24 month plan, you might not get the benefit of the better pricing - unless you complain loudly to your wireless broadband provider, which might help.
Still, if your business just lost a few thousand dollars from lost sales through no Internet connections from the recent Optus cable break, the expense of a backup wireless connection doesn’t look that expensive any more.
As for an alternative phone connection, the obvious option is a pre-paid mobile phone, which can be picked up from anywhere.
When at outage is on, you won’t be able to set your home or office phone to divert to another number because you’re in the midst of an outage and can’t dial the network to set the diversion in place.
But if you have a voicemail service on your number, you might be able to call it, log into the system and leave a new message giving customers or friends your temporary new number until the outage is over.
Another option is an independent VoIP service. Continued on page 4.
