Flying from Santiago to Miami one is faced with some rather rude shocks. The Santiago airport is gorgeous, full of glass and light. Rents are obviously fairly low because every nook and cranny of the airport is crammed with the kinds of shops that you’d find in any Chilean business district. There is a full-service pharmacy. There is a communications center where you can close yourself into a private phone booth, make calls, and pay for them at the end. There are Internet cafes. Miami, like most U.S. airports, seems only to be able to support the $5 slice of pizza store, the $5 magazine store, and the $5 coffee store. If you want to make a phone call you do it from a noisy public space. If you want to relax you pay $500/year to one of the airline clubs. If you want Internet access, you’re screwed. Most of the spaces in Miami are bleak empty wastelands of concrete and/or glass. In Santiago you feel like you’re in a shopping mall where occasionally a couple of hundred people leave en masse.
Oh yes… my feeble attempts to purchase Internet access for my laptop in MIA and LGA have led me to the conclusion that the U.S. will not, in the foreseeable future, have an 802.11 network with useful coverage. So I’ve decided to buy an $80/month unlimited data PC card from Verizon or Sprint. Anyone have experience with these services? My tendency is to want to go with Verizon because (a) they have the best coverage for voice calls, and (b) I think in the D.C. area where my family lives, they offer some kind of near-Broadband speeds on this service.
You might want to look into Cingular for your voice and data services. You can add an all you can eat data plan to most (all?) voice plans for $20/mo. Using a phone that supports EDGE, you can get speeds of up to 300 kbps (ie, more than twice the speed of ISDN).
-jav
My Dad has been using the $80/month unlimited Verizon data service for about a year and a half. He has direct Internet access on his laptop at work and home here in southern California, and when on the road between here and Colorado (where he bought a home for retirement – if and when). Almost anywhere you have voice, you have an Internet connection. He has not tried to use the Internet connection while driving (probably a good thing unless someone else is driving). He will upgrade to the newer/faster plan in about a week, though for his use (email and web browsing) the current speeds are decent.
I live and work in the DC Metro Area and I have had the $80/month service from Verizon for a little over a year.
Outside of the DC area I can pretty much get online from anywhere that I can get a phone to work from.
I get 300Kbps or better everywhere inside the Beltway I have tried. The high-speed service works most other places within 40 miles of DC, including BWI, Regan and Dulles terminals and parking lots.
In the high-speed area, VOIP is possible, and is the only time that cell switching is noticable (around a second of loss)…. yes it works while driving.
Email if you want more specifics on the service in DC.
I also have the Verizon unlimited data plan with a PC 5220 card.
It’s great. The one feature that is most useful for me is that it’s fully supported by an Apple-supplied driver on my OS X Powerbook.
I’ve traveled from one coast to the other and the card works most anywhere my Verizon phone is in digital mode (there were a few exceptions in remote areas of Wyoming and Eastern Oregon where the phone received a digital signal but no signal via the card).
It works while driving (or, rather, when being driven), too. And Boston now has Broadband support.
My only fear is that the service will become too popular and performance will drop…
I use Sprint’s PCS vision 1xRTT service which cost me $10 a month. They have since raised the price to $15 a month for new subscribers about a year ago. I am happy with the service which allows me to hook up my laptop to my cellphone and get on the internet. The speed is about 2-4 times a 56k modem which is good enough for me.I used this mostly between Bay Area and Tahoe on I-80 where Sprint’s cell coverage is excellent. I’ve also used the service without a glitch in NY/NJ and Texas. My use is sporadic enough not to justify moving up to the Verizon $80 plan,which was not available in Bay Area 2 years ago. From what I’ve heard, the Verizon plan uses 1xEV-DO which allow you to get speeds up to 2.4Mb/s and they are expanding their supported cities beyond San Diego and DC. If I had the dough and the need for bandwidth I would definitely move up to Verizon. I wonder with the Verizon service if you are able to move seemlessly between 1xEV-DO and 1xRTT?
Hey Phil,
Welcome back from Chile! I use my Verizon cell phone, with an inexpensive USB cable, to connect my laptop to the Internet when I’m commuting on the commuter rail in the morning. It’s not the fastest solution — but I imagine the speed would be the same as with an actual card. And it works, and it’s pretty convenient.
Tom
I’ve been using the Verizon $80/month plan for a little over a year now. This is definitely what you want to be using, as it’s MUCH faster than any of its competitors. Verizon has been aggressive in rolling out their 1X-EVDO service (the variant of CDMA on which this particular service is based, which has a rad data rate of 2.4 Mbps and effective throughput of 300-500 Kbps), and has it active in quite a few major cities–notably including the Boston and New York regions in addition to Washington DC. When the high-speed service is unavailable, it falls back to service based on 1X-RTT CDMA, which has a 144 Kbps raw data rate and effective throughput of 30-40Kbps).
Phil
I sympathize. US airports are a disgrace.
Verizon does indeed have the best coverage of any US cell provider. This is because they have the best peering arrangements — if there’s a signal in the area, Verizon has made a deal with that provider so Verizon customers can use it. I haven’t tried Verizon’s high speed wireless, but I hear it works very well. I’m wondering — does it work in Canada as well?
I use the 14.4 connection through my cell phone a lot, which is fine for email and some other stuff. The connection is almost instant, and very reliable. It counts as regular minutes on my calling plan, with no additional charges.
I have been using the Sprint Treo for the last couple of months. You can link it to the laptop with PDAnet, but its pretty handy just on its own. I typically see 64-75k sustained transfers with a top end of around 115kbit. Just fine for Email/IM/IRC, and ok for web browsing as long as I’m a little patient. The GSM Treos are supposed to start shipping soon as well, and they will have EDGE support.