Bump for the latest update.
We got back into town right near the end of our billing period on AT&T. Though our current mifi unit has been acting better since my last post, I found that AT&T's "you're nearing your data limit" text messages and emails are getting greatly delayed (if they arrive at all). Monday morning after we left our rig (with most of our technology in hand to update apps and files at our house), I got a 75% of data used text message (we were already into our first 1 gig overage at this point). With today (Tuesday) being our new billing period, I made it a point to minimize data usage to stretch that last 1/4 gig of data through the day and evening. I even called the *data# number on my phone and it verified that 800-ish megabytes had been used.
20 minutes later, I get another text message indicating that our 1 gig was used up and another was starting. Based upon the messages, one would assume that something back at the trailer was using 250 megabytes of data per 20 minutes. I later verified via AT&T's website that the data had, in fact, been used prior to Monday morning. The messages were just not being sent out real-time. We marched straight to AT&T and decided we were going to switch out our mifi unit (that we assumed was eating up data) for a USB thumb drive modem to use with our Wifi Ranger. AT&T no longer carries USB thumb drive modems.
To make a long story short, Verizon is shipping our new UML290 thumb drive modem to us this week and we'll be using that with the Wifi Ranger for internet connectivity. We'll be dropping our data package from 20 to 5 gigs at AT&T (we still have phones, etc. under contract for a while). Between the two carriers, we'll by paying about the same overall for data and phones. Eventually, when we decide to upgrade phones (3 of 4 on our AT&T plan are already eligible), we'll do those on Verizon.
