Internet Everywhere
February 19, 2008 by Greg
One of the troubles of traveling is finding dependable internet access. I spent my first few days in New Orleans hitting coffee shops, drinking tea, and soaking up the free wifi wherever I found it. After just an hour though, those wooden dining chairs detract from the fantasy of working around cute baristas all day.
After a quick trip to the Verizon kiosk yesterday, I’m now online at home and most anywhere else I want to be. With a small USB modem I’ve got internet access in most of the nation. The speed is great too, this morning I just ran a test and I’m pulling 720 Kb/s down with 179 Kb/s up.
One step closer to the mobile office. Now how to transport my 22″ widescreen monitor and Mirra chair everywhere I go…
720 down is tolerable, I wouldn’t go so far as calling it ‘great’.
Watch it though, IIRC there’s a 5gb monthly transfer limit for Verizon’s data service.
You’d have to be downloading a fuck load to hit 5bg in a month. I average 2.5 gig on my aircard (go for the PCMCIA card btw none of that bulky USB nonsense, more on this later)
Anyhow my average day on the aircard is 9 hours with Gmail, Outlook Exchange, Microsoft Communicator open all day long transferring packets, and a VERY healthy amount of web usage.
Unless you are downloading entire seasons of 24 via BitTorrent you shouldn’t have a problem.
Agree with cash 720 is tolerable. For web, email, chat, its decent. If you need to download software…meh not so much.
As for cards, I have the Option GT max from AT&T with the butterfly antenna. The 3G circuits are made by qualcomm as they are in my previous cell phone (1st gen blackjack), in some areas I only get “Edge’ servce on the PCMCIA card but I can get 3G if I tether my blackjack.
Thats another thing that should be added to this post (sorry I’m so disorganized) if you have a decent phone you can “tether” it to your laptop and connect to the Internet that way. Beware if you don’t have the right data plan they will charge by kb and its pretty expensive. Like tens of thousands of dollars if you did a couple gig. Tethering kills batter extremely fast so you need to be able to charge it while tethered. Blackjack won’t charge via USB while tethered via USB. So to charge and tether I tether over bluetooth to the lapop so I can use the AC adapter.
Anyway enough rambling… aircards kick ass. Especially if you want to access some things and the only network available is one that is monitored by a client….