I'm on vacation this week, and the big question on my mind beyond when are we going to the beach is when will AT&T let its customers use the 3G capability they are building in vacation communities around the USA?

This week my family and I are on vacation in Stone Harbor, NJ. For those of you who don't know the area, Stone Harbor is about 75-miles southeast of Philadelphia-- a few towns from the end of Cape May.

Stone Harbor is almost entirely a vacation community. There are fewer than 2,000 year-round residents. It's one of the most expensive places to own a home in the United States, but we are fortunate to be able to afford to rent one of the smaller homes for a week of sun and fun this year.

It amazes me that AT&T Mobility decided to upgrade Shore communities like this one with 3G, because it seems like they are not allowing the data capabilities to be used to anything close to their potential. I think they realized that people come here for a week or more at a time, and that most of the places they stay don't have broadband installed as an amenity. But the contracts they offer their customers severely limit the benefits of having 3G service.

Five years ago I spent a week in a different small house in Stone Harbor and thought, next time I come here I bet a lot of these houses will have WiFi installed. Here we are in 2008 and I see a few WiFi networks on the street where we are staying, but they clearly aren't in every home.

I can work here thanks to 3G. I wrote this post in the living room of the house I rented, not in the Stone Harbor Library or the Starbucks in Rio Grande.

But the fact of the matter is that the average AT&T customer is not able to access 3G data services in a way that makes it possible to work from their living rooms in a place like Stone Harbor. Most customers don't have 3G-capable phones. Software that converts a 3G phone into an ad hoc WiFi access point is virtually unheard of in the USA. Even users of the iPhone 3G can't effectively work because they aren't permitted to tether their phones to a notebook computer or another Internet-capable device. This is a limitation of the AT&T Terms of Service more than anything else.

This is the part of the 3G build out by the US-based mobile phone carriers that doesn't make sense to me. Why aren't AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile offering data service bundles that make it easy for vacationers to use 3G data services to stay in touch with the office? This seems like an easy way to get existing customers to trade up to the iPhone 3G and other 3G-enabled smartphones.