Bring your own wifi.

Want to bring your own wifi hotspot with you rather than suffer the agonies of lousy hotel systems or ill equipped restaurants? Want to upload your snaps to friends or write and upload your blog from the road? Want to do whatever it is you do seamlessly on your travels?

Well, now it’s easy and cheap. It’s called the MiFi 2200 from Virgin Mobile, it’s the size of a credit card, although a bit thicker, runs four hours on a charge and it costs $150.

The Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 – 140% of life size

It also works fine off the mains. $40 monthly for unlimited use on the Sprint cellular network and it fools your computer into thinking it’s a wifi source, not cellular 3G, so things you cannot download using 3G (like large files) work fine.

Before I bought one and signed up I checked coverage for 3G Sprint at Sprint’s coverage map for my favorite places in California – I refuse to fly, so that means driving distance. These include Monterey Bay and Carmel, both a two hour ramble from home in the old roadster.

Well, it turns out that Sprint is excellent (=orange) in both locations; here’s Carmel for example:

After signing up (more passwords and codes than a retriever’s litter – a disgrace) I tried it with my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. All work perfectly. While my iPhone has 3G built in (my iPad version does not) this reduces battery drain on the iPhone significantly. On Airport Extreme/AT&T 10mB/s broadband, my iPad usually gets about 4mB/s download; I got 1.1 mB/s using the diminutive MiFi. I also tested it using this slower speed with an HD Netflix movie and it works fine. Wow!

I like to drive to Carmel and Monterey Bay now and then for some R&R and have been staying at the Pine Inn on Ocean Avenue in Carmel since before wifi was invented. The Pine Inn has the worst – the absolutely WORST – wifi on the planet and I have been complaining about it mightily for years and years. They smile and do nothing. Another favorite, the Spindrift Inn in Monterey, just down from the Monterey Aquarium, always tries to charge me for their wifi (a truly dumb business practice) and I always have to fight to get the charge reversed as the service is awful.

No more!

The additional advantages of the gadget are that you can have up to five computers/devices accessing it at the same time and it uses WPA encryption for high security. I’m going to see about getting a second battery for travel, just in case. Battery life is claimed to be 4 hrs, 40 hours standby. Plus, when iPad2 comes along, I’ll buy the cheaper non-3G version as the MiFi is device independent – meaning it’s not built in.

But here’s the real killer feature for someone like me who simply cannot be without the Internet. The MiFi works perfectly with my desktop HackPro which of course has no cellular receiver! It may not be a speed demon, but it works fine, so if AT&T’s wifi goes down at home, the desktop HackPro thinks the MiFi is just another Wifi source and can lock on to it. So the MiFi is also a wifi backup system in the home.

Here it is running on the MacBookAir (2WIRE665 is the native AT&T feed; Tigger’s Network is the Airport Extreme wifi in the home; the seemingly unsecured Tigger’s Airport Extreme is actually a secure Airport Express range extender which the Mac seems incapable of naming or displaying properly):

For some reason Virgin Mobile has decided that when the MiFi 2200 is connected to your MacBook using the provided USB cable as an alternate charging source, its wifi/3G is disconnected. Duh! Well, needless to say there’s a hack out there to fix that – a simple change in the config file, so I’ll be doing that tomorrow. That means one less charger to carry on the road.

Just for fun this was written using the MiFi to proof, upload and finalize the whole piece on the MacBook Air from the road. While obviously slower than native wifi, after a while I was so into the process that I no longer noticed. The MiFi sat in my shirt pocket, got noticeably warm to the touch – not old Apple TV fry-your-eggs-and-bacon hot nor new Apple TV too-cool-for-school cool – and worked like a charm.

What are you waiting for?

Warning! Update January 13, 2011:

Just received this from the crooks at Virgin Mobile – they are limiting monthly downloads to 5gB for new MiFi plans bought January 15, 2011 or later:

Hey, Virgin? Up yours!