Steve Wozniak doesn't have broadband at home.

An interesting piece of information surfaced on the internet this weekend.  Steve Wozniak, the true brains behind the beginning of Apple, does not have a broadband service at home.  He instead uses a combination of 3G and 4G services to provide himself with the internet that he needs.  He claims that it is really hard, if not impossible for the local providers to get access to his current residence.

Now I was thinking, that a guy like this has to use tons and tons of data for his home service especially being such a fanboy of mobile technology as he is.  So I decided to check around the internet and look for providers and costs of having nothing but mobile broadband where I live.  

The first thing I came across is the fact that no one in my area offers 4g service yet.  Ok so T-mobile and AT&T claim to have but come on guys we know its just a faster 3g service.  So until someone offers LTE, I will not say there is 4g service in my area.  The second thing I noticed, barely anyone has unlimited data and those who do claim that you get full speed until certain data break points and then it becomes drastically slower.  Others just flat out do not offer unlimited and say this is how much data you are getting, you go over, you pay more or get cut off for the rest of the month.

So, knowing these two factors I decided to take an estimate of exactly how much data I truly use.  I surf the internet, play games on my PS3 online, play MMO's on my Mac, I stream music, movies and shows through various offerings online.  So, I would say that I at least use greater than 5 gigs of data per month.  

After taking that into consideration this pretty much throws me into the highest tiers for all services offered so we are looking at around 60 to 70 bucks per month.  Now I am pretty sure that I would always go over this data amount for sure.  Especially when there is a lovely beta version of a game that I just have to try out.  So economically it would be cheaper to keep what I have currently, (Cable internet 20 mps, for $40 bucks a month.)  Oh and it is unlimited data.

Also, as I was writing that last line I realized unless I go with T-mobile or AT&T.  I would not get a good speed at all.  These GSM services offer on average from 3 to 7 mps data rate while CDMA technology (Sprint & Verizon) can only offer up to 1.4 mps.  Now this is due to a technology restriction on CDMA towers which causes the signal to not be able to offer any faster speeds than that.  So regardless of the fact of the price, speed is important to do most of what I do online.  I would need the fastest and those all have data caps.  So I will have to say Steve, that no I will not be joining you just yet in your wireless only household.  I, unlike you, do not have a ton of money to throw around frankly it just makes more sense for now, to keep my cable internet.  Maybe one day but not right now.