My Review Of Datajack…
The Product:
www.thedatajack.com
$39.99/mo Unlimited 3G Data, No Contract, Month To Month Billing
Device Costs $149.99
Order Process:
Real straight forward and even overnight shipping was reasonable which I took advantage of. Ordered very late Thursday night and it arrived Monday morning.
Wish the maps were a little more detailed and you could zoom. Took me a while to determine the service is T-Mobile native.
The Device:
It’s a iCON 452 Quad Band 3G modem, nice modem since it will run on both the AT&T 3G band (Although worthless I will explain later) and the T-Mobile 3G band. Supports all the different GSM data protocols out there.
This is a No CD device the connection software is stored in flash on the drive.
The device has a Micro SD slot so you can put up to a 32GB card in and also remove the SIM card if you want to use in another card.
THERE IS NO EXTERNAL ANTENNA JACK.
Software:
Installed the Option software on my 64bit Vista machine no problem, very straight forward program with a “Auto Connect” being really the only option.
Performance:
This is where things head down hill in a hurry at least for me in Omaha.
My office park is centrally located in the metro directly across from I-680, the device had full bars at my desk on T-Mobile however was showing GPRS for coverage. I would have done a speed test however the device was so slow I could not get the flash app on any of the speedtest sites to load… Yes that slow.
Now of note Omaha is not a “True” T-Mobile market, they do not sell service in Omaha however have just enough towers that the FCC would not revoke their license for having spectrum and not providing service to x% of the population. I did not really expect it to work well in our metro knowing this, if you live in a T-Mobile town you will have better luck than me.
On that subject lets talk a little about T-Mobile and roaming…
As was the buzz a few months ago T-Mobile changed their roaming so if you are in a T-Mobile licensed market you can’t roam. Most carriers such as Sprint & Verizon will solve coverage gaps in metro areas by simply allowing you to roam even if they are supposed to have coverage and or adding more towers. T-Mobile has taken a scorched earth approach, if you are in an area that MIGHT get a T-Mobile signal that’s all you get until you are somewhere there CAN’T POSSIBILLY GET A SIGNAL… then you can roam. So just because you can’t see the tower with your device if they THINK you might see a native tower from for say the roof of the tallest building within 20mi of their tower it’s not going to work.
I had to get out of Omaha.
I took Hwy 6 west towards the Valley NWS office as I got about a mile from my office the card attempted to roam to AT&T the service then just went dead.
As I got further out of Omaha I picked up a T-Mobile EDGE tower interestingly on the edge of the Omaha city limit I held this for a few miles.
Once I passed the edge of Omaha the card tried to roam on Viaero Wireless (A rural Nebraska GSM carrier) this handoff did not go well as it required me to hit the connect button again. It warned me there may be roaming charges, I hit OK and tried to connect. Although the device showed connected I could not pass data once I pulled and reset the card it worked well on Viaero EDGE network.
From the front of the NWS office I did a speed test and was able to get 144k down and 30k up… about what I would expect from a EDGE network.
I drove a different way back to Omaha going by my house outside Gretna where there is some T-Mobile coverage once again hitting the dead zone where T-Mobile was not only too cheap to put up their own towers but also to cheap to pay to use someone else’s.
In Conclusion:
If you live in a T-Mobile market that has 3G and you have coverage in your home this thing would be GREAT. For chasing your going to have to put up with that roaming problem around major cities and interstates. This is not saying the service will not work on Highways, you will have that buffer where T-Mobile and the roaming partner overlap.
Your prob not going to be streaming video with this card unless you have 3G coverage EDGE is just too slow. It would make an OK basic card for Gr3 and F5, web browsing was horridly slow but livable. CDMA carriers such as Verizon or Sprint are going to be your best bet for universal coverage but if you just need a card without a contract and a simple price structure this will work well.
I hope to get over to Iowa and get a real 3G experience for this device and add to the review.