iPad 2 - AT&T vs. Verizon in NYC?

Verizon

pretty sure verizon's HQ is nearby... and when there's an HQ there's a massive show of force, in this case in the form of signal towers

The correct answer is neither. Buy the wi-fi version and tether it to your phone. Save $130.

Don't the carriers charge for tethering, too?

Yes but they charge for the 3G on the iPad too. Either way you pay for the data, but if you tether from your phone you save the $130 added cost up front on the iPad.

I agree with rouse, but you do not get built in gps with a wifi only iPad, which is a pain. Cant use many mobile features. AT&T is cheaper for usage up to 2gb, after that Verizon gets the upper hand.

I thought I heard if you tether it with an iPhone it can piggy back on it's GPS. Not sure if that works with other phones. EDIT: The other big advantage to just buying a tethering plan for your phone is you can use it for anything. Laptop, portable game system, e-reader, whatever. It's versatile, while getting 3G for your iPad is not.

is tethering something you can turn on and off as far as billing goes (AT&T)? say i'm gonna travel in august...can i just turn it on and pay the 20 bucks for that month or is there a contract involved?

I'm 90% sure you don't have to do a contract for tethering. You just have to turn it on for the month and turn it off when you don't need it. I would talk to someone at an ATT store to be sure. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...nd-pricing.ars EDIT: I know I am not the only one to think this, but it is completely ridiculous that we have to pay extra to share the data we are already paying for with other devices.

yeah that sucks, but tethering is a hell of a better deal than the standard ipad data plan. thanks for the head's up. i was sweating only having the wi-fi but i'd rarely need 3G access, anyways.

Yup, now that you can do an iPhone (or most other smart phones) as wi-fi hotspots it became a lot less important to get 3G built in to other devices. Everyone carries their phone with them everywhere anyways.

As far as I know, only the US carriers fuck you over when it comes to tethering. In the rest of the world, you don't have to pay a dime more. I have an iPhone 4 with AT&T and the service sucks. In midtown during weekdays data usage is sometimes is non-existant.

I live in SF and have a Verizon iPhone and an iPad that is wireless only. If you jailbreak your iPhone with greenpois0n (google it) you can add cydia. Cydia is an app store for non-Apple approved apps. Buy an app called MyWi which will allow you to tether your iPad (or anything else) for free. It is perfectly legal to jailbreak your iPhone, however the tethering is a gray area. There have been some people reporting that they have gotten texts from AT&T saying they notice tethering without a tethering plan. They offer to add a tethering plan for a fee if the use continues. Apparently they can be tipped off if you start using far more data than before. If you are just using it occasionally, when there is no free wifi available, it is unlikely that there will be any issues.

Maybe the US carriers do deep packet inspections to make sure their subscribers are not doing any non-approved tethering, like inspecting the browser's user agent string. Things like:- Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.2; Trident/4.0; Media Center PC 4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 3.0.04320) These could not possibly come from a mobile phone's web browser.