Sprint Air Cards!

[DurocShark]

We have one Air Card for whoever's oncall so he/she can VPN in from anywhere in an emergency.

I submitted a proposal to have all of us with company laptops get them. I just KNEW there was no way they'd spring the $$ for the cards and then the air time...

Then the director came by yesterday and handed me a signed request.

😀

This is what I'm talking about.

 

[brunswickite]

How good are AirCard connections?

Arnt they slower then 56k and flakey?

edit: why doesnt your company just give you blackberrys? If the Oncall is paged how hard is it to get on a computer and vpn in?

 

[DurocShark]

Originally posted by: brunswickite
How good are AirCard connections?

Arnt they slower then 56k and flakey?

Really good. I get 125k down on the one we have when I'm in a good signal area. Goodbye TMobile hotspot charges!

 

[isekii]

Originally posted by: DurocShark

Originally posted by: brunswickite
How good are AirCard connections?

Arnt they slower then 56k and flakey?

Really good. I get 125k down on the one we have when I'm in a good signal area. Goodbye TMobile hotspot charges!

are you sure you bought the right model ?
The 550 is used with sprint and verizonwireless I believe.

The 750 or something is used with GSM services.

 

[brunswickite]

edit: why doesnt your company just give you blackberrys? If the Oncall is paged how hard is it to get on a computer and vpn in?

 

[DurocShark]

Isekii: The 550 is the correct model. Notice the subject says Sprint. 😉

We have those too. But you can't VPN with a crackberry. I know that some handhelds could, but a few of our apps won't run on anything other than a PC.

brunswickite: There's no REAL business reason for us all to have 'em. But a few of our users have them and it's just nice to have the equipment you're troubleshooting for someone else. And I do occasionally work when I'm not at work. With one of these I can work on the knowledge base while sitting at the park watching my kids.

 

[loup garou]

sheesh, if you like em so much, I've got one Sprint gave me for free when they were giving them away a few years ago. PM me your address and its yours for shipping.

 

[DurocShark]

Originally posted by: werk
sheesh, if you like em so much, I've got one Sprint gave me for free when they were giving them away a few years ago. PM me your address and its yours for shipping.

Thanks, but it's the minutes that kill ya. 😉

Amazing how much time I can spend neffing on ATOT. :shocked:

 

[luv2chill]

I have one from work... they're pretty cool. I recently VPN'ed in from a plane (hadn't taken off yet) and it works great with remote desktop. It is fairly high-latency though, and real-world speed is usually ~70kbps. Still better than dial-up, and the wireless aspect is cool of course.

We pay $80/month for it though, for unlimited Vision usage. Is your company doing one of the cheaper, metered plans? I think the cheapest was like $20 for 20MB per month (or something equally tiny). If your company did go cheap, watch out for the overages!

Do you have Sprint PCS phone service? For occasional use you can just get a data cable (or a bluetooth phone-- the SE T608) and use that for web access on your laptop. Sprint technically says that's a no-no, but as long as you keep your data usage within a couple hunded MB a month you will be fine (if you have consistently high usage, they will remove Vision from your phone, although not without warning you first).

l2c

 

[luv2chill]

dp

 

[DurocShark]

luv2chill: I honestly don't know what kind of plan we have. I didn't know they did unlimited for the aircards though. I'll bet that's why they did it. 😀

I personally have PCS and used the cable for my pc a few years ago when I didn't have a land line or cable or dsl or anything yet (just moved in). It worked well enough, but at the time it was like 18k. Ouch.

 

[ManyBeers]

Hi' I have Earthlink Wireless Enhanced Access for laptops (CDMA) Sierra Air Card 555 ,
unlimited data transfer 79.95 a month,card cost 299.95,1 year connect agreement .
My service comes with Fourelle Venturi compression software to speed up data transfer.