About 90 seconds after purchasing my iPod touch, I started thinking, “Man, this gizmo just wants to be online 24/7.” So I started making plans to do that.

The normal person reads that paragraph and thinks, “Damn, Jeff, that’s called an iPhone.” But I am not a normal person—and in my opinion AT&T has crippled the iPhone so badly that it’s just not a viable option.

The Criteria

I have a basic philosophy which is currently at odds with the American telecommunications industry: I want to pay for a single, fast, mobile Internet connection, over which I can do anything I damn well please, and to which I can connect any device I like.

This has been available for nearly a decade by knowing your way around various cell phone hacks, most of which were officially unsupported by your cellular provider. “Unsupported” could mean anything from “we don’t mind if you do this” to “we’re going to actively shut you down if we find out.” This is starting to change as more cell phones—notably Android cell phones—ship with built-in cellular-to-Wifi hotspot applications. But it’s still up to the carrier whether they will delete them, support them, or charge extra for their use.

AT&T is notably lagging behind in this regard. You can now (finally) tether your iPhone to a laptop over Bluetooth, but AT&T will charge you $20 for the privilege, without providing you with any extra data over the standard two-gigabyte monthly allotment. This, to my way of thinking, is batshit crazy. (And more crazy is that if you have an iPhone and an iPad, then you need two different AT&T payments.)

These days, if you want “fast,” that’s defined as 4G, and that’s available from Sprint and T-Mobile. Both sell phones with wifi hotspots built-in; I’m especially tempted by the Android MyTouch 4G—$450 without a contract.

Which leads to the second criteria: sell me a service which I want to stick with. Don’t lock me into a two-year contract for your service. Two years? This is Internet time we’re talking about. Two years is a decade.

The Solution

After much evaluation and gnashing of teeth, I settled on a Clear 4G+ mobile mifi hotspot, which uses WiMax service in its 4G coverage area, and shifts back to 3G outside of those zones. I ‘m writing this now from a Barnes and Noble, where my podcasts are merrily downloading at 580 kilobytes per second, despite the 178 Kb/sec cap I’d have if I were using the local wifi (and the fact that on a Saturday night, their wifi is saturated and slow as molasses).

Said mifi happily rides around in a backpack pocket while I’m ambulatory, keeping my iPod touch online at pretty much all times. (Known dead zones: some Metro stations, all Metro tunnels, and the Borders cafe at 18th & L.)

But there were still a bunch of steps necessary to make the setup usable, with iPod apps and some tweaks to both my hardware and telecom plans—so this will be a multipart post.