Disadvantages of Mobile Internet Connections

Nowadays Internet access is quite cheap. Even if you want to get a mobile broadband connection, you don’t have to pay too much money. Currently I’m able to test the service of o2’s UMTS network. It play very well with my Arch Gnu/Linux powered netbook (It does actually work even better than on a Windows 7 machine. Ok, no big surprise. *g*). I discovered only some minor drawbacks:

1. I don’t get the promised 7.2 Mbit/s. But as long as the connection is faster than dial-up, I can live with that fact.
2. Speed is capped after 5 GiB of data traffic. This might not be sufficient for full Internet experience. So updating all the Linux system and downloading isos or other stuff must be done with an alternate connection. But even if I hit the limit, I’ll be able to access with GRPS connection speed.
3. I can’t offer TCP/IP services. No webserver, no FTP-server, no nothing. The PPP-daemon connects to the private o2-subnetwork and connections to the outer Internet can only be established over the ISP’s NAT-router. This prevents direct access from the Internet to my machine behind the UMTS modem.

Apart from that, it’s fun. :)