Cellular internet
For quite a while now, it has been possible to pick up Wi-Fi Internet via your phones and either ‘tether’ it to you laptop, or turn the phone into a ‘hotspot’ into which a laptop with a built-in Wi-Fi receiver can tune.
Then the ‘dongle’ was invented – a device that plugs directly into a USB port on your laptop, allowing connection to any cellular data network. Both these methods are a tad slow, but they work. Their downside is that they are single-user devices and they take over the receiver so that other phone/laptop functions can’t be used simultaneously. point yet in spending more on a 4G platform, when the slower 3G is more than adequate. However, things move fast in the world of technology and I wouldn’t be surprised if the changeover from 3G to 4G isn’t total within two or three years.
Any 4G device will still also work with the slower 2G and 3G networks as well, if that’s all that’s available in the area where you’re cruising, but will automatically select the best signal it can find at the time.