What Service to Get For Wireless Laptop Access (Not Wifi)

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flintoftmatty

New member
Hi Everyone,
I want to get wireless internet service for my laptop. I will be mostly using it n New York City but if I occasionally travel internationally. I've been looking around and I like that Sprint is offering a $59.99 unlimited plan and that they have a USB modem available.

Any advice would be appreciated

Take care,
Terry
 
I think you should make your signature a bit larger...

That thing requires a warning for users on dialup.

Anyway, I would go with Sprint. I'm in Philly and had a horrible experience with the Cingular service. It was slower than 56K, always dropped, and caused some interference that made the mouse move erratically.
 
Where do you travel out side the US?

I assume you are looking at air cards instead of using a cell phone to tie to the laptop. If you are looking at using the cell as your modem, then make sure you have a tethering plan or you will find some pretty high data charges on your bill.

EV-DO (Verizon and Sprint) is faster than EDGE (Cingular and T-Mobile), however, EV-DO can only be accessed here in the USA and in couple Central American and Carribean countries. EDGE is on the GSM networks and available in more places out side the US.

EV-DO is advertised at speeds approaching 1.2 mbps and EDGE's fastest speed is 236 kbps (usually in the 70-80 kbps range).

For the best coverage and speed, I recommend Verizon EV-DO. Verizon has better US coverage than Sprint, however Sprint should be about as good in the NYC area. I have the Verizon air card and use it all the time on my PC when free wireless is not available. Works great in most places.
 
Thank you both for the replies.
Ok so it seems like Cingular just isn't very appealing, even though they do offer worldwide coverage
It seems like Sprint is the way to go being that it is cheaper than Verizon and that I will be mostly in NYC

Thanks again
 
One other thing about Cingular - for international use, you pay 1.9 cents per kilobyte of data in addition to your monthly fee.
 
We have EvDO in Canada, too.

We also have 3.5G GSM, HSDPA, in a few larger cities. It's quite a bit faster than EvDO.

Once it's deployed, the next version of CDMA will come out and it will be faster than HSDPA... and the cycle will repeat.
 
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