Mobile broadband hope: Walmart, TruConnect, Netzero, Sprint, Amazon and why I'm waiting on my next iPhone

I recently reviewed the state of American mobile broadband, including mifi, tethering and iPad hotspots. Bottom  line - the Verizon/AT&T duopoly means the market is bleak and getting worse. I can believe Srinivasan's claim that "Mobile service providers are moving towards just one bundle of voice and data at $100 per month.

That's a lot of money, even for the 2%. It's ridiculously expensive for the mass market. If Verizon and AT&T succeed, they'll put immense pressure on Apple's margins -- and wipe out Google's margins completely.

Unless Google acquires T-mobile there's only one option in play - Sprint. The weak, wounded, third rate carrier that desperately needs friends.

Except the option isn't really Sprint, but rather MVNOs [2] that have negotiated access to Sprint's aging CDMA network.

Sprint, and its motley allies like TruConnect Mobile MiFi. It's a "mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that sells 3G mobile data service for laptops and tablets such as the Apple iPad and the Kindle Fire via the Sprint wireless network" (wikipedia). They've recently partnered with Walmart to deliver Internet on the Go.

'Internet on the Go' seems promising -- buy a data block with, practically speaking, no expiration. There's only one glitch. The web site doesn't mention price.

Yeah, that's weird, but you can find the price listed on Walmart [4]. The current price seems to be $45 for 1 GB [1] That's a lot more than the US-standard monthly charge of $50 for 2GB. The big difference though, is that the 1GB doesn't expire. My wife, for example, does quite a bit on her iPhone and is often below 200MB/month (no video, no software installs, no purchases, etc). With similar usage I wonder if I could stretch that 1GB out to 3-4 months -- at which point it's relatively economical. [3]

Walmart is a potential disruptor. You know that Verizon and AT&T are keeping one eye on them, even as they put their other eyes on Google and Apple (they have lots of eyes).

Amazon is another potential disruptor, it's already a covert MVNO player. 

Then there are the small guys like NetZero offering a $35/month 2GB plan over the Clearwire WiMAX 4G Network  (alas, this Engadget review doesn't match current pricing). Ok, that's no better than Virgin, but the difference is their $10/month 500 MB plan and $20/month 1GB plan - if you can use ClearWire. [5]. Most importantly, NetZero doesn't have overage fees ...

A. With NetZero 4G Mobile Broadband there are no overage charges. Customers cannot accidently exceed their monthly data allotment. We alert our customers when they reach their data limit and, if they want to continue accessing the Internet, they can either quickly and easily update their data plan, or buy extra data "Top Ups" that are good through the end of their billing cycle.

That's big. NetZero's hard stop puts them in the same league as Walmart's data block plan, and moves then well ahead of TruConnect's capless per MB fee.

So things are more interesting in the US market than I'd thought. I'm going to be researching both Walmart and NetZero; I'm likely to try one of them with my MacBook Air.

This also contributes to a decision to hold off on getting a new AT&T iPhone. I want to wait a few months and see what happens in this rapidly changing world. I'd love to buy an unlocked device ($600-$700) and bet able to, say, get voice and data with tethering for, say, $50/month.

- fn -

[1] The recommended MiFi (Mobile Hotspot) costs $120. I wonder if the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go MiFi 2200 would work, but I haven't researched that.

[2] It's forgotten now, but prior to Apple's AT&T announcement there was widespread speculation that the iPhone would run on an Apple MVNO. Alas, that was not to be. Watch this US MVNO list for potential disruptors.

[3] We have good Sprint service in most of MSP. Note that when one is paying for each bit fetched, Chrome's prefetch is a bug, not a feature.

[4] TruConnect's own package costs $40 per GB but $5/month. So if one assumes use of 4GB data per year Walmart's and TruConnect's cost are both $180/year. The catch is that that a data accident could run up a large TruConnect charge, but a Walmart credit provides a hard stop. The Walmart plan is a much better deal. 

[5] MSP can. So NetZero's cost could be as low as $120 (plus taxes/fees) for 6GB of data compared to Walmart at $180 for 4GB of data with equal overage prevention. NetZero relies on the quirky Clearwire network, Walmart uses the slowish Sprint network.

Update: I decided to gamble $50 and try NetZero using their 'free' 200MB option. My first experience was using their $#!$@ insane web site registration form, which does not appear to have been tested with Chrome. That led me to do a bit more research, which found sites like this. I couldn't find any reviews from people I trust, just a few 1 star user comments on a PC Magazine review.

On the other hand, while the Internet on the Go site said my area was covered, the Walmart.com web site mifi order form said it wasn't. (I think the first is correct.)

I think I'll give this a bit more time to settle out.

Update 7/28/12: A few similar Clearwire-based potential disruptors...

• FreedomPop: Similar to NetZero, but less costly. They were supposed to launch in "mid-2012", but are still struggling. They got a wee bit of VC money a month ago.
• TIng offers a Huawei Hotspot but their monthly rates aren't competitive.

Carbon Copy Cloner is now commercial. Good change, bad execution.

[See update: The lack of notification was a screw-up.]

Carbon Copy Cloner, one of my best loved apps, is no longer donationware. It is now a commercial product with a 30 day trial period.

That's great -- except the contract transition occurred during what seemed like a routine (albeit big) upgrade. I didn't see any warning that this was an unusual upgrade; but I've been a CCC user (I donated before there were post-donation registration codes) for a long time. Maybe there was a warning, but it was way too subtle for me. I don't see any notice on the front page of CCC's web site.

This is what I wrote Mike Bombich, the author of CCC.

I absolutely don't mind paying for CCC; in fact I'm glad to have that opportunity. I donated to CCC before, but that was before you tracked donations. Time for me to pay up again. That's not my problem.

I'm shocked, however, by a CCC update that made a contract switch without warning.

What you should have done was to do an update first that warned users that CCC was going to end-of-life on the donation model. Then the infrastructure would be in place to notify users that the next update would cost.

I used to use SuperDuper. I didn't mind paying for it, I used CCC because it was better. Now I have to decide whether to continue with CCC, or go through the pain of transitioning back to an inferior product because of how you handled this.

An apology to your customers would help a lot.

Again, I fully support your transitioning to a commercial model. I'm glad you did that. I'd have happily paid if you'd only warned me prior to the update. Of course I would have updated.

But you didn't warn.

I'll see how he responds before I switch back to SuperDuper.

Update: Mike Bombich responded with a sincere apology. He's amended the splash screen and release note with this warning. This was one of those bad-day mistakes; something that was missed in beta testing. He has a record of prior donations; he'll grant a license even if a donation was made prior to the 'registration' feature. In my case I'm happy to pay, I got my $10 worth a long time ago.

American MIFI - priced for a limited and shrinking market

I priced US cellular 3G/LTE data access recently. I was looking for something like $10/GB with 12 month expiration, I could then spend something like $60 every 2-4 months.

I didn't find anything like this. Disregarding device cost, most vendors came in at $50/month for 2GB [1]. That included DataJack, T-Mobile and AT&T iPhone tethering.

Virgin Mobile (Sprint reseller subsidiary) seemed to be $35 a month, so it had a clear price advantage. 

The best data access was an iPad at $30/month (no contract), but I assume a good part of the LTE iPad's price premium is an up-front payment to the carriers. So this pricing is probably equivalent to the Virgin Mobile pricing. A March 2012 article  claimed Verizon allowed LTE iPad tethering, but that seems quite unlike them. I haven't found any discussions of this; I assume it's false.

More recently AT&T and Verizon have "coincidentally" created very similar shared data plans that are effective price increases for most customers -- their "peculiar" coordination makes it unlikely that either will compete on price (or anything).

The bottom line was a significant price advantage with the Virgin/Sprint MiFi, but after reviewing the market no solution appealed. My impressions are:

• The MiFi market is going away. Carriers don't like them, and they're too geeky for most consumers. The US market is being driven to device-specific LTE access.
• Tethering is going away. Carriers don't like it; even T-Mobile doesn't seem serious.
• AT&T and Verizon have carved up a nice duopoly in the US. They may weather the end of SMS better than most of us would hope. Sooner or later, we're going to have to sign on to their shared data plans.

I'm putting my MiFi plans on hold for now. It will be interesting to watch how this market evolves, and what kind of tethering options will be available with the 8" iPad [2]. I'll be looking into the mifi market again in November.

[1] Of course they rarely price things so clearly; I just looked at what would provide me with 2GB over 30 days. This is contract-free pricing. There are often hidden fees  and caps tacked on to mobile charges; these corporations have mastered the profitable art of concealed pricing.

[2] The most anticipated product in recent Apple history. I suspect it will be $300 without a Retina display. 

Update: Virgin Mobile USA is a Sprint subsidiary, no relation to Virgin any more.

Update 7/22/12: I managed to overwrite this post with an older version. Oops. Here's roughly what I removed:

• Enon tells me in comments that the Verizon 3G/LTE iPad provides hotspot service at no extra fee - at least under his contract. The current contract may be different, but this is worth looking into. This would be a significant advantage over the AT&T 3G/LTE iPad! The monthly data fee for an iPad is $30 (cheaper than Virgin Mobile), but I suspect the purchase price of an iPad includes a carrier payment. So the real cost is probably about $35/month and thus comparable to a mifi. Even so, this is/was probably the best hotspot deal on the US market.
• Sprint iPhone has no tethering advantage, it requires a separate payment plan.
• See also: Benedict Evans • iPhone pricing and US market share. Interesting examples of how subsidy agreements in different markets changes iOS value.

Update 7/22/12b: Things aren't quite as bleak as I'd though. Walmart and others are trying to spoil VerizATT's party.

OS X Limitations: working around deletion of large numbers of files (time machine image)

I've run into problems like this, when I was unable to delete an OS X sparsebundle image on a Time Capsule.

I think I was able to use rm -r, but in some cases event that might not work. This Mac OS X hints discussion has several fixes: Script to delete huge sparsebundle images.

They include:

• AppleScript invocation of rm -rv
• unix commands including use of bands, xargs, head, find and so on.

The article includes related references

• osx - OS X - argument list too long for rm -rf *, 4000 files - Super User
• Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory | Randal L. Schwartz [blogs.perl.org] (millions of files to delete - some good discussion there too)

Fixing Outlook's Ctrl-D usability bug - with AutoHotkey

The letter S is next to the letter D - on my keyboard anyway.

That means when my lifelong q10sec Ctrl-S twitch hits, there's a 1/200 chance I hit Ctrl-D instead.

In Outlook Ctrl-S saves an email, but Ctrl-D deletes it - without warning. In the midst of my work my email vanishes.

This is annoying, but I usually catch it. I make a trip to the Deleted Items folder and drag the email back to Drafts. The other day, however, I was multitasking and didn't notice I'd deleted my email. It wasn't in the UI, it wasn't in Drafts, I probably assumed I'd sent it. Later I emptied my Deleted Items folder (because, by default, Microsoft's slightly daft Search tool includes Outlook Deleted Items, I keep that folder empty).

The email was gone. Minor panic ensued the next day. Fortunately I realized the email was lost, so I responded with an apology rather than being obnoxious.

I resolved to fix the bug. I found very little on the web, really just this one unanswered question: Ctrl-D del adjacent to Ctrl-S save. Either this afflicts very few people, or most don't realize what's happening.

So I asked on our corporate social network (Yammer) and a colleague gave me the answer. He wrote me an AutoHotkey macro that swallows the Ctrl-D key when Outlook is running.

;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ifwinactive ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
^d::
return

It works!

Since I grew up on TSRs (if you don't know what that means then you are blessed in more ways than one) so I try to avoid system hacks like this, but Outlook's Ctrl-D bug has broken me. Since I've signed up, I now need to find other ways to use this utility...

Pinboard and IFTTT - blog, task, share

Despite concerns about too many moving parts, I'm still using Reeder, Pinboard and IFTTT as my core information process workflow. I just added two more IFTT actions based on single character Pinboard tags. The current set is:

• s: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag s are "shared" via IFTTT to Twitter and WordPress (it's a public tag, so there's a Pinboard feed too).
• t: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag t generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a task. This is most often a f/u task on a product I'm interested in.
• b: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag b generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a draft Blogger post. (I prefer this to IFTT's limited Blogger channel). These are subjects I would like to write about.

I enter the one letter space separated tags when I share to Pinboard from Reeder.app for iOS and OS X, or from Google Reader. Many posts have two or three tags.

Password security: what if your desktop were stolen?

For various reasons, in addition to using 1Password (always encrypted), I keep a comprehensive set of family user credentials in a FileMaker database that began life over 15 years ago.

I need it to be accessible to Emily or my estate, particularly if I'm dead or incapacitated. I don't like making it too accessible though; recently a neighbors home was vandalized and some computers were taken. Losing hardware is always a problem, even if you have homeowner's insurance and good backups [1], but losing an unencrypted comprehensive password file is a bigger problem.

On the other hand, I don't need to defend against the NSA. The chances is low that anyone stealing my Mac would even bother to Google ways to browse the file system, or would know how to use FileMaker. It's even less likely that they'd scrape deleted or cache data. I just need need decent security.

Whole disk encryption would be more than decent [4], but I'm running Snowie [2] on the main machine. So I do that just on my MacBook Air. Instead this is what I do for the password file and for similar data:

• Used Disk Utility to create a 500 MB 256bit encrypted sparseimage in Users/Shared and moved my files to it. These images ignore permissions by default, that's what I want.
• I set permissions on both the sparseimage file and the mounted disk image to give r/w to Emily and I and nothing to anyone else. (You can't set permissions for the mounted image on the sidebar, you have to navigate the Finder to view the mount)
• In both of our user accounts I mounted the image and allowed OS X to store the password in the user keychain (so anyone knowing our login pw can get it).
• In both of our user accounts I added the image to the User Accounts login items.

With these settings every user can see a folder called 'confidential' (hint) but only Emily and I can open it.

 

It's just enough security so that if our home server were stolen I'd be able to revise our passwords over days rather than hours. [3]

 

-fn-

[1] I'm a believer in using two relatively unrelated techniques to do at least daily backup. For me thats Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Capsule/Time Machine with offsite rotation of 3 disks containing clones of varying age.

[2] Not only is Lion a memory/perfomance slug, it's also tied to iCloud -- which has been a bit of a disaster for me. I'm hoping to skip to Mountain Lion; maybe I'll get some features to go with the bloatware and the iCloud malware.

[3] The way I configure CCC deleted files are kept in archives. So after moving the database to the disk image I deleted it on CCC. That's not too bad a risk however because my clones are stored on an encrypted image (for offsite backup). So even if they take my backup disk they won't get much of benefit. If thieves took my Time Capsule I'd be in trouble with copies of the unencrypted file. So I opened TM and told it to delete ALL backups of the file (made me nervous to do that!). So I feel relatively covered, at least to the level of a typical burglar/vandal [4]  But wouldn't Time Machine backup the data to an unencrypted store anyway? Maybe a disk image is a better idea?

Update 7/18/2012: There's an odd permissions bug with creating documents on the shared image that limits this somewhat. Regardless of permissions on either the disk image or the mounted disk, whichever user mounts the image first has the "most" access. That is both users can open and edit existing documents/files, but only the first user to mount the image can create new documents. The second user gets this error message:

The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items.

This happens even though the image is configured to ignore permissions with both journaled and non-journaled MacOS formatted images and with sparseimage and standard image.

The workaround, paradoxically, is to turn off "ignore permissions" for the mounted image. With permissions enabled both users can read and write to the mounted image.