On 2015-05-18 at 17:10 -0500, Matt Lawrence wrote: > I've been using Clear for a few years now. Since Sprint bought them the > quality of service has declined greatly (no surprise there) and now the > service is going to be discontinued later on this year. So, I'm looking for > an alternative. I'm on an unlimited plan with a hotspot, and I kind of like > being on an unlimited plan, but the reality is that I don't really use that > much. I'm wondering if I might be better off using my phone (iPhone 4s) to > tether and if any of y'all have suggestions for providers to go with. I'm > currently with AT&T, but the phone has been paid off for a while now. I'm > also grandfathered to an unlimited data plan, but it does not allow > tethering. To activate tethering, I have to go to a metered plan of some > sort.
Who is paying? Why do you have a need for laptop connectivity when not near wifi? For most of us, I expect that the need for laptop or other non-phone connectivity as a "now" thing rather than "when I'm next near WiFi" is because there's a need to respond to a page or other alert, for work purposes. Which means that your employer should be paying for connectivity. For $work, I set the strong stance that while network problems might be infrequent, that they will happen is predictable and for us to be able to offer a response SLA, we had to handle this to at least some degree. So I made sure that we reimburse tethering for cellphones _and_ we provide MiFi devices, with every oncall location/team having access to a pool of MiFi devices where there is a device from a carrier other than your cellphone carrier. So here in Pittsburgh, we're sharing one MiFi device from Verizon, while everyone is on T-Mobile or other non-Verizon, and we cover all billing for the MiFi and reimburse not just the phone (because you're oncall and taking pages, up to some amount) but also the tethering. With T-Mobile, you might get away without paying for the tethering option at low usage rates, but it's simply not worth the risk of someone oncall being cut off because their usage went up while oncall. So get the tethering, file an expense reimbursement and be done with it. The extra $20/person/month for people who are oncall is nothing compared to salaries or the cost of downtime. So people who are oncall have office connectivity, home connectivity (reimbursed, especially for remote workers where that is their office) and two different cellular networks providing connectivity. If all of those go down, and you can't be reached, then your secondary takes over. If they can't be reached, things go up the chain and we find someone who can cover. Either your employer needs you to be available out of hours and can pay for connectivity to do it right, or they don't need you to be available out of hours, in which case: take a break, disconnect, leave the tech behind and go for a walk and relax. Don't pay out of your own pocket for connectivity when some other entity is what requires you to be available, your employer should not be relying upon your charity. Reconsider whether you need to always be online if not for some other entity. The only exceptions I'd make to this are cash-poor startups where you have founder equity and your availability for charities rather than for-profit corporations. -- https://www.apcera.com/ Apcera HCOS Hiring SREs, including remote workers; multi-cloud, Golang and more _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
