Hands-On with T-Mobile webConnect USB Laptop Stick

Better late than never. T-Mobile today announced its webConnect USB Laptop Stick  ($49.99 with a 2-year contract, plus $59.99 per month for 5GB of data), the carrier’s first 3G mobile broadband solution for notebooks. T-Mobile is years behind the competition when it comes to rolling out 3G modems, but this product has a few things going for it.

For starters, T-Mobile is throwing in unlimited HotSpot usage with the $59.99 monthly data fee, which means you’ll be able to access any of T-Mobile’s 10,000+ national Wi-Fi networks, even in places like Starbucks where the carrier roams on AT&T to provide coverage. The dongle, made by Huawei Technologies, also supports  international roaming (although T-Mobile doesn’t yet offer international data plans).

The second feature that is somewhat unique is the T-Mobile’s bandwidth usage meter, which lets you view how much data you’ve already used throughout the month. Other carriers like AT&T offer similar solutions online, but T-Mobile’s meter is conveniently built directly into the Connection Manager. T-Mobile says a pending software update which will enable the meter and provide charts of data usage patterns.

The problem is that T-Mobile’s 3G footprint is nowhere near as deep as the other major U.S. carriers. T-Mobile’s HSDPA network is available in 130 cities covering 100 million people, and the carrier plans to reach 200 million people by the end of the year. By comparison, AT&T and Sprint cover 258 million and 250 million people, respectively. Verizon reaches 274 million people and counting. So it’s no suprise that T-Mobile is targeting what it calls “locally mobile” customers. In other words, the webConnect USB Laptop Stock is not the best solution for commuters who need to get coverage in the suburbs, or business travelers who frequent cities that aren’t covered by T-Mobile’s network.

T-Mobile claims that customers can expect downlink speeds in the range of 600Kbps to 1Mbps with the webConnect, which is fast enough for browsing Web sites or streaming videos, so we decided to plug it in and give the device a quick test run.

While the dongle itself is a bit large compared to others we’ve tested, it doesn’t have an overly annoying blinking signal-status light; instead it’s just a small quick flash every now and then to let you know it’s connected. When we first plugged the webConnect USB stick in, it started automatically installing the T-Mobile Connection manager (built by Smith Micro). That means you don’t have to use a CD to install the device on other computers.

After the software installation finished, we were greeted by the home screen, which alerted us of all available networks, including Wi-Fi and T-Mobile’s 3G network. The software even has a T-Mobile HotSpot locator, which you can use to find T-Mobile’s available Wi-Fi networks; it lets you search by City, State, Country, or Zip/Area codes. The connection manager also lets you SMS friends or family directly from your computer.

We fired up a connection in our office with service fluctuating around 3-4 bars (out of 5)  and were able to load ESPN in 23 seconds, NYT.com in 21 seconds, and CNN’s homepage in 19 seconds. However, we were able to read most of the text on all of these sites after 11 or 12 seconds and the additional time was spent download media on the page.

We uploaded a 6MB image to Flickr in 3 minutes and 15 seconds, which meant we had an upload speed of 242Kbps during that test.  We downloaded a 7.2MB installation file from Firefox.com in 1 minute and 50 seconds, which meant our average download speed was 536Kbps. Not bad for having 3-4 bars in our office, but still on the slower side. Using SpeedTest.net to confirm our results, we saw download throughput speed in the area of 594Kbps and upload speeds at a somewhat faster 323Kbps.

We look forward to putting the webConnect USB through our full gamut of testing in three different locations over the next few days, but so far the mediocre speeds in our offices and T-Mobile’s limited footprint are major drawbacks.