Well, not that I'd contribute to getting the thread even more off topic (but that's kinda the norm around here), let me just say this about that...

Sometimes I can't even get a signal for the VHF broadcast and it takes the Spanish part way longer than the English so I'm constantly missing it or listening again because I missed something; makes me crazy!

Last November at the Renport office at Sunsail they were offering the wifi hotspot for $120/week. I negotiated and got $150 for 10 days. It was worth it to me but we go there often enough I knew I could beat that deal easily. No way I'd even consider $45 a night for the Surf Pak!!!

So here is the down side/tradoffs. You have to do a little research. First you will need an unlocked hotspot or you won't be able to put the new carrier's sim in the device and use it. Next, you will need to know what frequencies the carrier uses and that your hotspot matches at least one of these frequencies. It's easy enough to find out what frequencies the device uses on google; not so easy to find out what frequencies Digicel and Lime are using in the BVI. I sent an email to Digicel and their support told me they use 1900 Mhz. I suspected they also used 850 Mhz as well so I wrote back and asked. Then she confirmed they use 850 and 1900. I haven't been able to confirm with Lime, apparently calling is the only way to get customer service, but my searches seem to show Lime uses 850 and probably 2100 Mhz. Finally, you have to configure the "APN", easy enough to get that info off the web. Of course you can just go to the store, buy the device from them and have them insert their sim and configure it for you. So there are cost/convenience tradeoffs you can make.

So far I've probably spent 4 weeks researching all of this and it's taken a fair amount of work to get to the point where I feel I have it understood. All that and now I can take my $60 hotspot, pop by Lime/Digicel for a sim and a $50 data plan and have wifi on the boat. So for now on it will cost me around $50-$60 for data on board; sounds pretty good compared to $45 a day (or even the $15 a day I got last time).