Re: NEED Air Card for Laptop for 6 months

Techie wrote:
Does anyone know of anyone who will do a month to month air card
contract - Verizon, T Mobile, etc. Most want 1 year contract . Or go
from one to the other and keep it for 29 days.

What speeds are you expecting?

Cingular/AT&T have have EDGE(Enhanced Data for GSM Environment)
384 Kbps deployed in most of their network, but HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) is only in a few major markets at this time and is expected to compete with EV-DO in terms of speed.

Sprint and Verizon have deployed EV-DO and with maximum speeds up to 1,400 Kbps and Alltell claims theirs will do 2,400 Kbps.

I had a Cingular/AT&T USB "air card" and it top out at 180 Kbps (but then I'm not in the San Francisco Bay area - like someone else who will claim he gets the maximum speed).

My Sprint PCMIA card gets up to 1,400 Kbps, but have seen it as low as 900 Kbps.

Another issue to consider it what form factor of card your laptop uses. All carriers offer the older PCMIA cards and recently introduced the Express card form for the newer laptop - they are not interchangeable on your laptops (unless you get an add-on Express card to USB adapter for the older laptops). Both Cingular/AT&T and Sprint offer the more versatile USB devices.

Since all my laptops are mixed, I use a Sprint PCMIA card plugged into a D-Link DIR-450 device in my truck and WiFi three feet over to my laptops, or even half a mile with a rooftop mounted antenna. I have never been more than half a mile from my truck...unless on horseback or camping, and then I simply stick up a 40 ft Wonderpole at the base camp and full-duplex repeat from my nearest WiFi access point eight miles away.


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