Wireless Broadband and my addiction to electronics

If you’re not into the geek stuff .. skip this post

[ok .. jenna fischer nude it’s just us geeks now]

I was trolling around the Verizon store in the mall two days ago waiting for Rosie to finish shopping at some other store. She doesn’t normally leave me alone to long in any kind of store where there are electronics or gadgets as she calls them, but recently she must have been distracted by a big sale or something. That was her first mistake .. thinking that she was going to save money while I was left alone near a radio shack or a verizon wireless store. Crazyness. In 15 minutes on my own last week I picked up a tom tom GPS device, and an MP3 player at Radio Shack. It was an expensive 15 minutes, but at least I won’t get lost anymore.

Anywho, on to the Broadband part of this post. EVERYONE who knows me KNOWS I love my Verizon Broadband Card. I can get internet access ANYWHERE. I typically use it at work during the day to get to my personal email or to send files to friends. You can’t do that kind of thing on a bank network, so I just bring my own connection with me. I generally leave a cheap laptop at work, and just travel back and forth with my PCMCIA sized broadband card. Anyway, I discovered (while at the Verizon Wireless store) that they have a new model of broadband cards out that actually DOUBLE the speed of my internet connection. Naturally I had to get one. It’s a tax write off for my business I tell myself (I swear, i can justify anything). I’m getting between 700 kbps to 1.4 mbps on my broadband access card. It’s the Verizon USB720. Basically it’s a USB card. It works on any computer and takes just a few minutes to set up. I typically use it with a Dlink DIR-450 Router. Basically, i plug my trusty old modem into the router, and i can have multiple computers on my wireless network at once. I tend to use this for doing software demo’s at a client location, or hanging out at mud coffee shop in Mineola.

So .. I’m basically posting this because I get lots of questions about my wireless broadband card. Here’s the FAQ
1) how much does the service cost? … about $60 a month
2) how much was the wireless broadband card ? … about the price of a cell phone. Click here for the link
3) do you get a lot of dropped calls? …. no, I generally have no problems connecting to the network, and I don’t normally have to reconnect. I do tend to compute mostly from either my office or a coffee shop though. The few times I’ve ridden the bus and used my laptop, I didn’t encounter any dropped called either.
4) are there any additional charges? … not that I can think of
5) how does it compare to your cable modem? …. I get about 9.7 mbps at home on my cable modem compared to about 1.2 mbps on my verizon wirreless connection. On the other hand, for email, surfing the web, watching youtube videos, connecting to other servers for work, etc . I don’t notice a difference. Where the difference is noticable is when I download a ton of music, audio books or movies. These are typically large downloads and take more time on my wireless connection then on my cable modem.
6) how are connections outside of NYC? ….. I’ve had no problems connecting on Long Island, Va, Washington DC, San Diego, Pa, Syracuse, or anyplace else that I’ve been in the continential USA. I could not connect however in Tenerife Spain with it.

So .. now that I’ve upgraded to my faster card, if anyone wants the old card (pc5740), let me know. It’s a PCMCIA card and should work with any laptop or the DLINK DIR-450 Router. It gets between 500 and 700 kbps (which is not bad at all for most people).

Regards
Biff