What does 5 Gigs of Mifi Get For You?
The other day I blogged about the Lightyear Wireless exciting new Mifi product. Mifi is short for Mobile Broadband Internet. One thing I didn’t mention is that you get 5 Gigs of data with the monthly allocation for data. What exactly does that mean?
If you aren’t a techie you may not know what a “gigabyte” and even if you know what it is, it may not mean much. A gigabyte is about one billion bytes. Ok fine you might say, what good does that do? And you would be correct to ask that. So what does a gigabyte get you when applied to Mobile Broadband Internet?
Let’s put it in perspective to everyday usage. You can upload about 10,000 photos, download about 1,667 music tracks, and download about 7 full length movies. Now those are the heavy bandwidth consuming tasks. Most people don’t download an entire movie. But if you want streaming video and want to watch a whole movie on Netflix for example, that does not download the entire video. Only sections of it at a time and it’s far less than downloading the whole movie. Light bandwidth usage like email is not even worth talking about (you can send over a billion emails with a 5 gig limit). You can browse about a 2 million web pages. Frankly, most internet usage falls under light bandwidth usage.
So 5 gigs per month really goes a long way. The Lightyear Wireless Mifi does support 5 users so you can put the whole family on it. However, the more users you put on it, the more bandwidth that will be consumed. So if you have a heavy bandwidth user in your household (like a teen who downloads music tracks all the time), you may want to consider giving them their own Mifi device.
What is “MiFi” and Guess Who Has it?
Mifi refers to Mobile Broadband Internet Access and this is one of Lightyear Wireless’ newest product offerings. Introduced in February, the Lightyear Mifi product is $69 per month and like the pre paid wireless, has no contract. To make it clear what this product is, it will replace your ISP. So perhaps you have hard wired internet access from your cable company or phone company? This replaces that – however it’s wireless! It runs on the Sprint 3G (soon to be 4G) wireless network.
What this allows you to do is use your laptop (assuming your laptop computer has wireless capability) anywhere in the coverage area. This is different from that wireless router you might have sitting near your computer at home. That only works off your wired internet service and you are limited to a small area around that router – usually about a 200 feet radius. The Lightyear Mifi takes the place of that and you can take it with you anywhere. And yes, it is has a rechargeable battery making it a true portable internet appliance.
So that means if you want to use it in the park while you take your kids there, you would just slip the device in your laptop bag and go. That is assuming your park is in the coverage area. Most urban areas are in the Sprint coverage area. So this is yet another exciting addition to the Lightyear Wireless family of products!
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