I finally took the plunge and signed up for Verizon’s EVDO service (which they call Wireless Broadband). The purpose of all this is to increase my connectivity speed when I'm on the road and working at client locations. Right now, I have unlimited GPRS through my Audiovox SMT5600 SmartPhone ($25/month from AT&T Wireless now Cingular) but the speed (40kps average) is useful only for instant messaging and trickle feeding e-mail (and hoping people don’t send me big attachments).
Most clients I work at won’t let you hook up your laptop and you might get filtered web browser access on one of their machines if you are lucky (no instant messaging, no vpn, etc.) so for $80/month Verizon provide unlimited NationalAccess coverage at 100-140kbps and high speed BroadBandAccess (they quote 400-700kbps but I’ve seen reports up to 1mb) in major cities around the US (including Glenview, Illinois where I am working right now).
I went with the new Novatel V620 PCMCIA card because it had been given rave reviews and co-incidentally uses the same antenna connector as my Audiovox SMT 5600 phone (for which I already have a Wilson magmount which is essential when you are stuck in the basement of a building or a server room)
So why am I posting this via GPRS? The answer is that when I tried to hook up the card Windows would detect it but then the whole machine would freeze up. The first thing I did was Google™ for this behavior and I found someone else on the Dell support forum who complained of the same exact issue. I called Verizon and was extremely impressed with their tech support people who understood my issue and told me they had a list of laptops that had PCMCIA compatibility problems and mine was on it. They gave me an engineering number and told me to call Dell (and I knew that my troubles were about to start…)
I wish Dell had been as easy to talk to as Verizon. The first person I spoke with (who I think was in India) simply wanted me to try flashing the BIOS (with the same one I already had) and then tried to sell me a Dell 802.11g card (and she really didn’t understand there are other types of wireless out there) and was a complete dead end. I gave up for the evening and the next day I eventually managed to talk with someone in the Dell wireless area (which appears to be staffed out of the US) and thankfully the tech there did know what I was talking about and told me there was a fix but it requires replacing the motherboard. So now I have to send the laptop in for them to fix it! I thought we solved the PCMCIA power requirement problem years ago but apparently not. I've also seen this issue crop up on the new generation of 802.11 pre-n cards too.
Hopefully, when I get it back, I’ll be connected at a much faster speed and I’ll let you know how well it works :) Oh and yes, I know you guys in the UK are still stuck on miserable slow and expensive wireless connections :) :) :)