Froogle sees the RUT950 at $278 which is a little steep.
Yes, they're not cheap. Actually, $278 is probably a good price for the RUT950.
I was using an $88 Xgody phone that mostly worked. I used it for a couple months and I think the prolonged use of the WiFi hotspot maybe overheated it. The WiFi and GPS both stopped working after being intermittent. Both are sometimes built into the CPUs on those I've read.
Exactly. The, 'portable hotspot', funcion on those phones is not a good replacement for a real router in the long term, although it does work reasonably well in the short term. A higher-end phone may survive longer...
I have used USB tethering from a phone to an OpenBSD machine and bridged that to a WiFi card set up as an AP. I'm not impressed with the reliability of WiFi after using it a few months. It's convenient when it works but I'd rather run wires then maybe hang WiFi APs off them, like one at each end of the house.
There are definitely some weird bugs in the rate control code. Testing with various ral, ath, and athn devices, I've found that the higher the ratio of uploaded to downloaded bytes, the lower the, 'linespeed', becomes. For example, with no traffic, it might sit at OFDM56. Downloading over the wifi works fine, but as soon as you send data out, the rate drops, sometimes as low as DS1. Then, once you stop, or start sending data the other way, the rate picks up. Presumably this is a known issue.
I didn't know about umsm, I'll try to find one of the supported devices. That's what I was looking for.
I've experimented with several 3G, 'USB dongles', and had very little success, unfortunately. Random dropped connections and the device locking up and needing to be physically removed and re-inserted were the main problems. That was basically with various Huawaii dongles. Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did, if you go down that route. -- Tati Chevron Perl and FORTRAN specialist. SWABSIT development and migration department. http://www.swabsit.com
