A couple weeks ago, I picked up a teeny-tiny Sony Vaio TX750P for the times when I’m on the road, but don’t need a development-quality machine with me. If all I’m using it for is watching DVDs and playing poker in the hotel room, I don’t need my doubles-as-a-boat-anchor Dell XPS notebook with me.
Built into the Vaio is a WWAN card, which is essentially a cell phone that connects to Cingular’s EDGE network, to give me data anywhere I go (where Cingular has a network, anyway.) The idea is I don’t need to rely on local hotspots, when Cingular already has a lot of coverage. Sounds good to me. So, today, I finally got around to activating my free 30 day trial.
While I was reading the fine print to make sure they weren’t going to screw me by making me have a voice plan or some other nonsense, I noticed this line:
Yeah, that stopped me right in my tracks. They’re charging me $80/month for internet access, then telling me what applications I’m allowed to run. If I want to play poker or use Instant Messenger, they can shut me down, apparently. Hell, theoretically, I’m in violation of that just by firing up my PC and having Google Desktop try to get my profile, or Windows Defender trying to access SpyNet, or any number of other valid internet applications that don’t fall into their 2 broad categories.
In the Explanations page they DO say you can’t run a server, so hopefully that’s what they were trying to get across, but that’s not exactly what they said. They’re attempting to dictate what you CAN do in addition to what you can’t. They also say they may discontinue service after “sessions of excessive usage”. Nice.
I guess I’ll pass on the whole WWAN thing. Sounded nice before the caveats.
