One of the little known secrets of cell phones is that many models can act as modems, and connect your computer to the Internet through a cell carrier. In some cases, you can use a USB cable; in others, a laptop with Bluetooth can be tethered wirelessly with the device. You don’t need a special data card.

Costs are another matter. Providers are more than happy to charge you a special rate to connect to their data networks, an additional $30 to $60 per month for unlimited use depending on the carrier and speed. Or you can get a data plan a la carte that charges by the amount of information you use, which works if your only usage is the occasionally download of a few e-mails.

In practice, you may not need the service. The way some networks are set up, you may gain entry without a data plan and be charged the same rate as you would for a voice call — pretty steep during weekdays, but an excellent deal when you have free calling nights and weekends. Carriers tend to frown on this arrangement and may retroactively impose charges if you’re caught using their network contrary to terms of service. Still, look around the Internet and you’ll find a lot of recipes for this sort of hack.

If the Federal Communications Commission wants to take a good first step to opening up cellular networks, it could require companies to allow data networks to be used a la carte, billed like regular cell phone time rather than by kilobyte. This would encourage the casual use of laptops and nonproprietary devices like the Nokia, rather than force everyone who wants to use the Net wirelessly to buy a device plus data plan.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 7:18 am and is filed under Cell Phone Applications, Cell Phone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.