I had the opportunity to use the Verizon MiFi for a few days and it was great. I expected it to work but it goes beyond just working.

Where? It was tested out in the middle of nowhere - well, at a location in South Carolina about two hours from Charlotte. At this spot I had a no AT&T bars, but did just barely have service. I could send a text message but not confident that I would have had much success with a non-dropping call. My iPhone reported the big "E" - that painfully slow Edge network connection. Between the Edge and almost no service signal, even opening an email via AT&T was horribly slow to the point of "why bother". I don't have a Verizon phone (the service that the MiFi uses) so can't comment on coverage bars, but it must have been decent coverage and 3G service (see below).

Usability - setup. When I showed up someone had already configured the MiFi. The configuration involves a one-time process of connecting the device to a computer via USB and going through an easy setup wizard. The person who set it up is a non-techie and had no problems with it.

Usability -  get online. I got situated and powered up my tablet. The network was detected right away and, after entering the security password, I was online. It was no different from using a standard wireless router to connect to the Internet. If I didn't already know the connection was via MiFi, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Later in the day we had three different laptops connected to the single MiFi and none had problems.

Performance. Once online I did a little bit of web surfing and the experience was fine. Honestly, even though the connection was slower that what I'm used to on a daily basis, the experience of web browsing was totally fine. There was no point I had to sit and wait for a page to load. I ran a speed test to see what actual throughput we were getting and it tested at 1.3 Mbps download and 500 Kbps upload. No too shabby. Especially for a location that doesn't have cable or DSL as an option - and one where AT&T service barely registers.

Physical. The device is small and light - surprisingly so. It also has a rechargeable battery so after charged, you can pick it up and move around while online. I could easily stick it in my shirt pocket and walk around with my tablet while surfing the web if I wanted to.

Battery performance. I'm not sure exactly how long the battery lasts but we did use it for a few hours with no problems. The performance was identical whether plugged in to power or not. I did notice at one point that the connection started getting spotty. This was after hours of use unplugged and shortly later it started flashing red (battery dying) so I believe that performance degradation was just related to us running on battery too long.

All in all, it is a great little device and I highly recommend it for people who are mobile a lot and need decent-speed Internet - especially if you need an Internet connection for more than one device.

Similar to the Verizon MiFi hotspot I recently mentioned, Sprint also has a mobile wifi device. The main difference seeming to be that the Sprint device supports their new 4G networks - if you happen to be in an area that supports it. Here is a link to a review from MobileCrunch.

One of the staff here at ORCSWeb has been using the MiFi Mobile Hotspot from Verizon for a few months now and continues to have nothing but great feedback about it. It sounds like something that serious mobile warriors should check out. Here is a link with more details, pictures, and reviews about the product.

http://mobile.engadget.com/2009/05/13/verizon-mifi-2200-review/

The announcement of a future release of Wifi supporting gigabit speeds has sparked some very interesting discussions here at ORCSWeb. Topics like this are constant reminders of just how technically geeky our team is. :-)

So, gig-wifi... what can we do? Well, maybe there is a future enterprise level implementation scenario? Imagine when speeds reach 10 gig - or more! Imagine a data center with no network cables! Imagine the built-in redundancy rather than physical multi-path switch deployments. Imagine the ease of deployment, changes, and other network maintenance items. Nice.

Also though imagine the Wifi band congestion. There would need to be a solution to allow a ton more traffic and data flow than current standards support. There would also need to be a solution to allow many more private networks to be supported in reasonable proximity without stepping all over each other and generating interference.

Security would be another topic to dig deeply into and address. I can picture a future enterprise Wifi feature though that combines current-day security like WEP or WPA with some built-in VPN-type features... sort of like VLAN'ing and encrypting the wireless connections.

Of course if we are eliminating cables, how about those pesky power cables. There are already some very interesting advancements in wireless power - just check out some of the results from searching "wireless power" in Google.

Well, you heard it here first folks. The data center of the future - cable-free.

"Although the wireless 802.11n standard has just recently been made official, IEEE has begun work on the next iteration of WiFi. The coming upgrade may deliver speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second by improving on the efficiency of existing technology, according to Electronista."

http://www.pcworld.com/article/184067/wifi_80211ac_1gbps_by_2012.html?tk=rss_news

That's interesting. I suspect though that most home users likely get 5 Mbps or slower actual ISP connections to the Internet, so a faster wifi speed won't help in that regard. What it will help though is when people have multiple devices that are connected and streaming information between them. Say you have a TV device that can communicate with your home PC to stream movies (record or playback). This type faster wifi LAN connection would be a nice improvement.

Hopefully as the technology changes and the speed increases, they don't lose coverage range. In fact, I'd say that coverage range is likely a bigger issue right now to home consumers than the wifi speed (due to ISP speed limitations).