Data Caps suck

So I was reading about another carrier announcing surprisingly low data caps and thought I would offer a little personal experience with my parents household that relies exclusively on a data card from AT&T. Some time recently they did roll out HSDPA to the area so the data actually moves pretty quickly for casual browsing, and on most days performs at 768k DSL speed. By no means is this screaming, but it gets them through their day to day bill paying and shopping and online picture printing with costco. In fact it works so well that from time to time I forget the amount of work it took me to get them set up with wired connections to the office locations and wireless in the rest of the house. This all piggy backs off of a server 03 machine with pci to pcmcia adapter that houses a sierra wireless card. Now for any current data customers you might be saying that att doesn't support server 03 with the sierra drivers. Yeah I copied the keys from an xp machine, moved the files manually, and registered the device using the correct drivers all by hand because I am a masochist. the Server 03 machine runs as dhcp server and internet gateway for the household. The card and AT&T's data package works for them, it is in fact about their only option. Thankfully they have not run into the data cap issue, but I fear the day they do. This literally is the only way they can get relatively high speed internet in this house.

My parents home some how lives in a magical vacuum of high speed options, adjacent communities are served by Comcast, seems silly they are not.