USB wireless

Bear with me for a while, because my question is kind of long(or at least the way I phrased it is).

I just moved to a new city to get a job(hopefully) and rented a place, all nice and everything but it didn't have internet connection and the owner didn't want me to drill any holes to get cable, so he got me one of those wireless USB flash drive thingies. At first he was reluctant because he aldready has a contract with the internet provider and uses other wireless USBs like that in his work, and supposedly one can access his data if he uses a USB that's contracted to his name. Which leads me to my first question:

1.If one can access his data, can he monitor my internet usage as well?

The second thing is that my connection when browsing is supposed to be 1.5Mbps, or at least that's what the speed test says, but when I start downloading the speed drops to as little as 60 - 100 Kbps. So my second question is:

2.Why is that and is there anyway around this?

Any help you can offer is appreciated.

P.S I own a desktop PC, and not a laptop so I haven't had to deal with any kind of wireless before. Just mentioning that in case in matters that my PC is a desktop.

As you said it was an alternative to cable, I'm guessing this it's a 3g plan and not just a wireless dongle.

If he's paying for the plan, he will probably have access to some usage statistcs (how much you downloaded/uploaded in a given time), but that's about it. From what I've seen, ISPs don't let you access specific usage information like which websites have been visited and such. I'm not saying ISPs don't have that information, they definitely do, but they're not going to hand it out without being asked (that would probably just scare off customers).

Speed-wise, 3g depends a lot on your location.

Don't forget that ISPs and speedtests will show your internet speed in kilobits/megabits where as your browser (when downloading a file) will usually show it in kilobytes/megabits. There are 8 bits in a byte, so 1.5 megabits is only only 192 kilobytes.

Another thing is that sites that do speed tests provide huge amounts of bandwidth to properly test what speeds you're capable of. Other websites don't. Other websites need to divide their upload bandwidth evenly among users to so that everyone can download at at least an acceptable rate.

MoshBat wrote:

1. Yes. Easily.

Would using Tor solve that problem?

Also: Since this internet's real slow, is there another option I can use instead of his, that doesn't involve a cable?

Problem is I'm not allowed to get cable as I would have to drill some holes for that, so I'm wondering if there's some other solution aside from the 3G/4G sticks.

If you are asking if TOR will allow you to hide your data usage statistics, then no. The actual data? Yes. Satellite tends to be expensive, at least here. You might be better off seeing if you can use a neighbor's wifi connection first

I was asking about the data, I don't mind if they check the statistics (not that my data is anything special, but just for privacy's sake). Guess I'm off to see if my neighbours have wifi.