As my loyal Roxiticus Desperate Housewives readers have learned, Rex and I have been spending more time in our New York office, which means lots more time commuting on New Jersey Transit from Bernardsville, NJ to Hoboken and home again, home again (jiggety jog). I'm thinking about getting an AT&T Wireless PC card for my HP notebook so I can access the Internet from the train.Some questions for you, dear readers:
- Have you had any luck with a wireless PC card while in motion... in the car (hopefully with someone else at the wheel), on a bus or train?
- Is one wireless provider better for Internet access than another, and/or does it depend on your geography and AT&T and Verizon's coverage areas? I'm leaning towards AT&T Wireless because of my iPhone, but I'm not sure there's any financial benefit to being brand-loyal as a PC card doesn't seem to be part of the "family plan" packages
- Is one PC card manufacturer better than another, or one form of connection? Looking at the AT&T Wireless web site, I see USBConnect Mercury, Sierra Wireless Aircard, and Option GT Ultra Express.... and I think there's also a way to connect through a "tethered Blackberry."
- How does Internet access via a wireless PC card compare with an iPhone or Blackberry? I've read reviews that use terms like "lightning fast" and I can tell you neither my iPhone (on EDGE, not on the new 3G network) nor Rex's Blackberry does anything "lightning fast" on the train...
- And ugh... $60/month seems a bit rich, and that's for 5GB of data... is that "enough data"? It looks like both AT&T and Verizon have the same $60/5GB plan, and Verizon was nice enough to pull together some examples supporting the theory that 5GB is plenty... a "typical web page lookup" is 150kb... based on this assumption, I would need to look up approximately 34,952 web pages in a month (or over one thousand per day) to reach 5GB. Now, my friends Mariuca and LadyJava may drop their EntreCards on 600 sites per day, but I doubt that even with a three hour round trip commute on the train that I'd go over the limit.
