With only one plan for 24 hours of consecutive use, Verizon DayPass is the kind of service you’d use on vacation or at a business conference. The Mobile Broadband DayPass from Verizon Wireless is the first of its kind from one of the major carriers.
Usually, prepaid mobile broadband providers lease or rent bandwidth from one of the big three (Sprint, Verizon or AT&T) as they have an already established 3G network.
That’s changing.
Since it’s introduction, Verizon has introduced several other prepaid mobile broadband plans while AT&T offers prepaid mobile broadband and prepaid wireless broadband.
What’s the difference?
“Think of wireless broadband, (Wi-Fi for example) like a cordless phone. It’s good for around the house. Mobile broadband, however is like your cell phone. Good just about any and everywhere”.
Lesson 1 – Mobile Broadband Buyer’s Guide
Now, if you apply that to prepaid wireless broadband and prepaid mobile broadband, things change ever so slightly.
By design, they’re both supposed to be convenient and available in a lot of places. So instead of above, it becomes something more like this:
Prepaid wireless broadband is like having multiple phone booths across cities you visit. Prepaid mobile broadband, however, is like a prepaid cell phone.
Still good for just about anywhere but you’ve got to remember to ‘top up’ your credit or pay a month in advance. In addition to this, you buy (as opposed to rent) the actual cell phone”.
So in what would only be a logical move, Verizon is the first of the big 3 to offer prepaid mobile broadband.
Normally each section of the review would have its dedicated page. However, since we’ve extensively covered Verizon mobile broadband’s speed, coverage and broadband cards, we’ll only cover Verizon DayPass Plans & Prices in detail here:
Verizon Mobile Broadband Speed
Verizon Mobile Broadband Coverage
Verizon AirCards & Broadband Cards
Verizon DayPass Plans & Prices
Currently there’s only one Verizon DayPass plan:
1. $15 for 24 hours of mobile broadband service
While we’d love to see a mashup of plans like those offered by Cricket and Slingshot, for now this is all we get. In addition to this, we can speculate that offering plans to compete with Cricket and Slingshot might reduce the amount of post-paid mobile broadband subscribers. However, we can’t be fully sure. Nevertheless, this is the sort of plan you’d use for only occasional internet use.
With no contracts or commitments, the up front price would be the cost of the service plus a broadband card.
We could go into what you can and can’t do on their network, but with only 24 hours of use, there’s only so much downloading or uploading you could do. At their current typical speeds of 600 – 1.4 Mbps downloading and 500 – 800 Kbps, it’d be practically impossible to hit any sort of 5 Gigabyte cap (if it even existed for a DayPass plan).
An interesting alternative that sets Verizon DayPass apart from the competition is the option to use built-in mobile broadband. Consider this scenario:
You could have a laptop with built-in mobile broadband. Since you’re surrounded by free Wi-Fi a lot or already have Wi-Fi at your home, you don’t necessarily feel like paying $60 a month for 5 GB of dedicated mobile broadband. However, you do travel occasionally. In that instance, you can activate Verizon DayPass to hold you over on your trips (in the airport, hotel, etc). For those circumstances, it’ll work quite nicely.
Update: This comes courtesy of Brian, an MBR (Mobile-Broadband-Reviews.com) reader:
“it should be noted that currently the only Verizon DayPass hardware option that works as advertised (self-activation in BroadbandAccess coverage areas) is with laptops and netbooks (and maybe that portable hotspot of theirs) with embedded EVDO hardware. Add-on EVDO modems will work with DayPass, even PCMCIA (which their website denies), but every time you want to use it you have to call that number, buy the time, manually activate the modem again, then you’re good to go”.
Very important and duly noted.
For added convenience, you can also purchase ‘sessions’ (more time) through the connection manager software or calling (800) 786-8419.
Overall Impression
Verizon DayPass is useful for what it does. It’s perfect for short-term crucial times when you need mobile broadband. With the added convenience of using broadband cards or built-in mobile broadband, it’s a service to look out for especially since they added more plans.
To see how Verizon DayPass matches up against other carriers, check out the 2010 Prepaid Mobile Broadband Comparison.
Need more info? Check out the rest of the mobile broadband reviews.