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Yous tin get a securely discounted netbook from either AT&T or Verizon, every bit long every bit you're willing to sign up for a two-year data plan; but no matter which service provider's netbook bargain you choose, the toll will be virtually the same. Nosotros saw similar toll parity when we conducted our cost-of-buying study of pop smartphones.

We discovered the similarity in bottom-line prices subsequently examining the 2-yr costs of buying of various (subsidized) netbooks sold by Verizon and AT&T (Sprint and T-Mobile don't yet offering such deals). The wireless broadband carriers began selling netbooks only this twelvemonth, and they have adopted a pricing model similar to the one they apply for selling cell phones and smartphones.

What's on Sale?

Verizon offers either of two netbooks–the Gateway LT2016u or the HP Mini 1151NR (currently out of stock)–for $150. If you were to buy them elsewhere and without the data plan, the Gateway would cost effectually $300 and the HP would run about $400.

AT&T sells the Acer Aspire I, the Dell Mini x, and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 for $200 each. If you lot buy any of these netbooks elsewhere (sans information plan) yous volition pay about $300 for the Acer, $349 for the Dell, or $330 for the Lenovo.

Click on the thumbnail paradigm to the left to view our chart containing a detailed comparison of the full cost of ownership for the five netbooks now being sold by U.South. wireless broadband service providers.

Not Unlimited Data

Unlike smartphone information plans, which typically promise to provide unlimited data for $30 per calendar month, data-only 3G service for netbooks gives you much less for a lot more than. Both AT&T and Verizon offer two tiers of data-only service: for $forty per month, y'all get 250MB (from Verizon) or 200MB (from AT&T) of information per calendar month; for $60 per month, you lot get 5GB of data per calendar month.

Exceed your monthly bandwidth cap, and yous'll pay extra: Verizon charges x cents per additional 1MB on the lower tier and 5 cents per additional 1MB on the higher tier; AT&T charges $ten per boosted 100MB on the lower tier and a whopping 50 cents per boosted 1MB on the higher tier.

The Cost of Speed

You pay for speed, too. Verizon'south EvDO Mobile Broadband network advertises download speeds of 0.6 to 1.4 megabits per second (mbps), and upload speeds of 0.5 to 0.8 mbps. AT&T'south DataConnect plans advertise slightly higher speeds: downloads at 0.7 to one.7 mbps, and uploads at 0.5 to 1.2 mbps. Of course, customers' actual results vary–check out our own 3G tests and compare for yourself.

The Specs

All of the netbooks mentioned here have approximately the same specs: a 1.6GHz Intel Cantlet processor, a x-inch display, 1GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows XP. This generation of netbooks already feels sluggish when put to work on any just the most barebones task; when netbooks equipped with multiple processors or Ion chipsets make it, we may notice the temptation to buy one a lot stronger.

The Lesser Line

Verizon's and AT&T'south subsidized netbook deals have almost identical total costs. If y'all settled for the lower data cap (and avoided exceeding it), you'd spend around $1100 over the 24 months of your service contract, whether you went with Verizon or with AT&T. But a monthly information allotment of 250MB is barely plenty to keep most people on elevation of their e-mail, and then most users would be better served by the higher information cap, in which instance they'd be spending about $1625 over ii years with either wireless company (again bold that they never exceeded the information maximum in any month). So if AT&T and Verizon 3G provide coverage of roughly equal quality in your area (a big assumption, evidently), AT&T gets the nod for offering slightly better netbooks. On the other hand, if you lot exceed your monthly allocation, AT&T will charge you significantly more for in a higher place-the-cap information service.

Consider the Alternative, or Not

If yous'd rather not buy your netbook from a phone visitor, you can buy information technology at an unsubsidized cost elsewhere. For case, you lot can buy a Dell Mini x directly from Dell online for $349 (AT&T sells the aforementioned model for $150, with two-year service contract). But you still have to purchase 3G service from some wireless carrier, and it's cheaper to sign up for a two-year stretch–especially when you consider the cost of the USB modem yous'll take to purchase to connect your netbook to the 3G goodness.

If y'all're hell-bent on avoiding a long-term contract, y'all tin either purchase a netbook at its "no-delivery price" ($600 from Verizon, $450 from AT&T) or buy your own netbook elsewhere and purchase a USB modem from Verizon (prices range from $50 to $200) or AT&T ($120). Depending on how much you spend on the netbook, this option would put yous over the $2000 mark for ii years of ownership.

Clearly, buying through a wireless carrier is no manner to save coin on a netbook. But the experience of using a netbook mainly involves the stuff it can admission by connecting to the Web via fast wireless Cyberspace service; the netbook itself is actually only a lightweight endpoint. If y'all think about it that fashion, the sticker stupor you go from the ii-year price of a subsidized netbooks might not be so shocking.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/173698/service_provider_netbook_bundles.html

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