Mobile Broadband Options with Telstra

These days we have more options for broadband connections than ever before, which is useful as a few areas of our part of the Sunshine Coast are still out of reach of ADSL.  With the proliferation of mobile wireless broadband, most of us are able to get a broadband connection at home or on the move.  Today I’ll summarise some of the Telstra wireless broadband products as many people aren’t sure what they should get.  Other providers such as Optus, Vodafone etc also have wireless broadband products but as Telstra has the best reception coverage I always advise people to go with them, even though it often pains me to do so!

Telstra offer a few different options.  First you have you standard USB stick, providing broadband to the PC it is plugged in to.  You can get the standard 3g or the latest 4g version, and although most of the sunshine coast isn’t yet covered by 4g it may be in the future and the 4g will fall back to 3g if needed.  Next you have the Ultimate Wifi product, which is a small device that lets you connect up to five devices wirelessly to it.  It doesn’t need to be plugged into a PC at all but you will need a wireless adapter for your PC to connect to it (all laptops now have WiFi built in).  Finally you have the Elite WiFi product, which gives you what looks like a normal wireless modem, allowing you to connect four devices to it with a cable, and also as many devices wirelessly as you like.  This product I can no longer see on the Telstra site though so it may be discontinued.  Never fear though, if you need this kind of connection at home you can purchase a 3g/4g router which allows you to plug in Telstras 3g or 4g USB stick and share the connection in your house that way.  Note if you want to do anything fancy like rmeotelyconnect to your PCs fomr outside your home or office, you will need to use a proper router to enable this to work. Talk to me if you need help!