Well here in my country they introduced 4G technology. Its pretty awsome. Speed is quite good upto now since the usage is low. Still the cost is high so I dont think it will catch up the market until the cost goes down a bit.

Does influence play a role there in US ? If so that might be the case. Here in Asia it plays a major role and all the crappy things get ahead because of that.

No idea.. What is it ? Here in SL its Dialog

I also carry mulitple hotspot devices and a subscription to boingo by skype for real emergencies but does anyone know for the USA which hotspot device they recommend the most?

Clear is just horrible.  Horrible.  I don't know why they don't go into some other line of business, since they aren't up to delivering packets of digital information.

I go to Maine for two weeks every year, and connectivity from there is...interesting. We've gone from dialup to, now, having Verizon mifis because Verizon offers the best service there. At this point, I could also use my AT&T phone to tether, for areas where Verizon isn't available. But I've done my share of going to the library, or sitting in the library parking lot in the car when the library was closed. (Fortunately they left the wifi on.)

It's too bad you couldn't get a single box that would look and say "Hey, AT&T's bes here, so I'll use that. Wups, that just went out, so I'll switch to Sprint." etc.

As far as Clear, it can be *very* spotty. I was curious, and wanted to try it, because I'd heard horror stories. My laptop was supposed to come with a 30-day Clear trial with no credit card, and I couldn't get any of the local Clear providers to honor it. They'd give me a 3-day trial. Well, I'm sorry, but 3 days isn't going to give me a good idea of the breadth of coverage unless I spend the three days driving around testing it. And I'd heard so many horror stories about not being able to cancel, and huge termination fees, that I didn't want to risk setting up a system and then trying to cancel it.

Great post.  You wrote "Adhering to last year's status quo for functionality, price, and contract service level agreements (SLAs) guarantees a net loss for your IT budget expenditures."  I focused on the word's "last year's status quo" and that is, in my mind, the key.

Whereas once upon a time the status quo could be rested on for at least a year or two - in the world of remote users and remote access it never stops changing.  You want to manage all remote users in the same way - but the technology is changing while at the same time the vendors want to force you into multi-year contract committments. 

Unless you are really big and can boss around the telcos - you are caught between wanting standards, wanting to make it easy for staff and wanting to spend money wisely.  Achieving all three is not an easy feat!

Improving connectivity would, in my opinion also increase employ satisfaction. With the increase in work throughput more empowerment will be gained by the employees which would result in a general good feeling among employees being sent out into the field by companies. This would also reflect in their dealings with the customer which would in turn yield an overall positive outlook for the company.