Mobile Broadband - mostly crap

Spare a thought for regional Australian's who are trying to find reliable mobile broadband services beyond the boundaries of the big cities.

Where I am today - in a large regional centre not very far from a capital city - the mobile broadband services are - to use a technical term - *mostly crap*.

I have a variety of 3G devices (from Huawei and Sierra Wireless) registered with three of the local carriers (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) - just so I can kid myself that one of them might actually work when the others don't.

Everyone will tell you that the Telstra service is the best performer in this space - but that is not my experience at all.

It is true that the Telstra Next G service is marginally faster than that of the competing 3G services.  But it is terribly unreliable and just stops for minutes (sometimes hours) at a time - it even does this in the big cities.  The other 3G services are much slower but they usually do keep going.

I am not technically knowledgeable about this gear - but it looks to me like the Telstra service is just hugely congested - and that is probably also true for the other carriers.  I was in a Telstra shop today and the geek there was trying to sell me the new Telstra 4G service.  From all accounts it is much better.

But - do I really need three 3G services and a 4G service - just so I can access the internet when I am away from home base?

I will probably acquire the 4G thingy - and it will probably be better for a while - but when that starts to slow down will they release something called 5G?  And what will I then do with all my existing services and hardware?

Does anyone out there have any suggestions about how to deal with this problem?