PhoneNews.com early this morning set up its Broadband2Go account, marking the first known activation of the new plan. The plan was supposed to launch Tuesday, but as previously reported, was delayed 48 hours.
As shown in the screen shots above, the activation process is straightforward and can be done from within the MiFi, using a series of intranet pages that appear upon connecting to the MiFi initially.
Of note, as we connected for the first time, we noticed that the megabyte counter did not read as unlimited, but instead reported 419,430 MB remaining, or approximately 409.5 GB of bandwidth. While certainly higher than 5 GB of standard carriers, it isn’t completely unlimited. However, the issue is likely moot, as to pass that amount you would need to maintain 1.5 mbps for at least 30 days of use. EV-DO Rev A may have a theoretical maximum in the multi-megabit range, but in practice it bursts between 1 and 1.5 mbps.
With Virgin Mobile touting this as a home broadband replacement, the maximum amount you can download with Broadband2Go per month is nearly double Comcast’s 250 GB bandwidth cap.
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Have my Ovation MC760 coming to me today!
As soon as I heard about this new plan I bought in immediately.
I have been stuck with HughesNet satellite access for almost 4 years now. This might FINALLY be the last nail in that rusty metal coffin.
This all hinges on whether I can maintain a solid signal. With HughesNet I get a solid 1Mbps download link – if this comes anywhere close, I will cancel next month. The kick in the pants with HughesNet is that the upload speed is .16Mbps (yes, you read that right) and the latency is 816ms (OMG, almost a full second) This makes things like gaming and chat services such as FaceTime with the iPhone useless.
I really, really hope this works – half the price I am paying now with no contract and (roughly) the same speeds.
THANK YOU VIRGIN MOBILE!!!!!!!!
Christopher, what are the speeds your getting? Will the Mifi and usb dongle be about the same speeds?
Sorry…never mind. I re-read what you wrote. 1-1.5 speeds. Its to early in the morning for me. LOL
As I posted earlier in a different article, Cricket’s speeds were around 600kbps whereas Sprint consistently gave me 1.5Mbps. I am curious what you really get with it.
We’re hitting 1.5 mbps with no issues. Speeds are averaging around 1.2 mbps in the speed tests we’ve run. Most of our tests are indoors in less than optimal signal areas.
Wait until more unlimited users get on the network.
409 Gig hmmm? Well…if they are going to give you a usage meter, even if unlimited, then there has to be a finite maximum count value at some point, since computers can only store finite values in any given memory allocation. Infinity is NaN (not a number) to a ccomputer.
Corinne from Virgin Mobile here – we looked into this based on your post about the usage meter hitting 409 GB. Please know that the reading of the 409 GB that you experienced was a bug and the meter should always read unlimited with a fully green bar. Going forward you should only see Unlimited and a fully green bar.
For those who are wondering – I use this service in Iowa, I always get either 1/4 or 2/4 signal bars with the device and my latency usually is 400ms or so. I’ve seen it as low as 100 some and as high as 1000 some. The 1000 some is rare and it always goes down to the hundreds in less than a couple of minutes. These latency reports are from World of Warcraft, which I very happily play with Virgin Mobile’s mobile broadband. It is so so so much better than playing on Wild Blue satellite connection! Thank you very much, Virgin Mobile. I will chop off both of my arms if this deal ever changes…unless it gets better of course haha.
When is Virgin Mobile going to assign random IPs to it’s users rather than one giant shared IP?
Using my Broadband2go card has flagged my bank, PayPal, and several other websites as being Blacklisted/Fraud/Spam… any ideas?