I appreciate your reply. I am not sure why I don't always have 3G - I am literally "bathed in dark blue" on the AT&T coverage map. It's very strange. I started out with the Motorola Atrix 4G (loved that phone) but after 2 days of 3G speeds, it suddenly reversed the upload and download speeds. Very strange. It stayed like that for over a week with them trying to "relocate" me to a different tower several times. It finally eventually went back to normal, but we thought maybe it was a 4G phone/3G area problem, so I went to the Captivate (hated that phone). That worked well for a week, but I have to have the phone in my upstairs window and I work down in the basement. It kept randomly shutting off the Wifi Hotspot on its own and I was constantly running up and down the stairs turning it back on. Took it back and got the HTC Inspire 4G. It worked great for about 10 days and then started doing the same thing the Atrix did, only I would have very slow download and upload for 1 day, then go with the reversed speeds (download around 300, upload around 1.6 or up). That lasted for about a week and it went back to normal. AT&T is stumped. However, I did find that even at the 300 download speed, it still worked better with the program I work with than my satellite did at 1.7 download because of the latency issue.
I thought seriously about the AT&T modem, I really did. However, it's cheaper for me to use my phone as a modem and I have to keep the satellite anyway for the kids. I have a 12 yo son that loves YouTube and he has run me over several times on my 500 MB per day satellite allowance, so I don't dare let him use my AT&T connection. I'm hoping that one of these days we will have some type of broadband out here that I can put all the computers in the house on, but for now that's not going to happen. Our phone company is CenturyTel and they basically told us we will never have DSL.
Thanks again for the site. It has been my go-to site every time I've had speed issues and wanted to see what I'm actually running. I'm just loving being able to come out of the Dark Ages, even if only on one computer.