[Ti] Wireless card

[Steve Wozniak]

At 2:52 PM -0800 2005.03.01, Lorne Chapman wrote:
>
>I am planning on buying a wireless PCI card for my Ti 667. I believe that I want a "g" level card for the higher speed.
>The use will be while traveling - airports, hotels etc.  In my home office I'm in the same location all the time so will likely
>just continue to plug in the ethernet cable from the house network.
>
>I'd appreciate any shared experience with the various cards on the market as well as comments on what to consider.

One of the best computer purchases of my life was a PC 5220 card from Verizon that gives me unlimited data at 300 Kb for $80 per month. I used a driver for this card that came from an insider. You insert the card and the port is recognized and the Internet Connect info is sucked from the card to make a Network Location. I was told that this driver was part of OS X 10.3.6 and up but I'm not sure it works, having tried it in a couple of raw PowerBooks. I still have to use my driver. This card saved me a ton of money over the last year.

I found that some places, certain rooms in certain hotels for example, don't work with Verizon. So I got a second card, the Sony/Ericcson GC83 EDGE card, for GSM systems.

I had a devil of a time trying to get its predecessor, the GC82, to work once. I found online that you had to get it updated to a version with a 'd' suffix and the updater failed at the last step, after an hour of misery getting other things updated first, with Virtual PC. The updater also failed on a real PC. So I gave up back then.

The problem with such cards is that there's no easy way to find the Internet Connect data, Name, Password, dialing number, etc. I remember stumbling on a web page once that told me that you enter the number to dial as 'proxy' for AT&T wireless GPRS phones, with no name or password. But nobody in AT&T Wireless customer support, sales support or technical support could tell me this simple thing; I lucked into it.

My new card being on Cingular (they bought AT&T Wireless) I needed to get this secret information again. I tried and tried to find clues online and could probably have copied data from someone's smartphone set up for internet access, but what I found was a $40 program, QuickLink Mobile. I don't know if it works with Verizon cards but it identified my card and Cingular and created a Network Location for it, with a somewhat standard dialing number of *99***3#, name ispda at cingulargprs.com and some hidden password that I don't know.

This card still did not work. When I'd bought it, along with some RAZR phones, the salesman said that I had to follow some procedure to authorize my phones. I asked how I could do that with the data card. I'd paid for data only on it ($80/month unlimited). The salesman said that it was pre-authorized. Well, I went to my local Cingular dealer complaining about a bad card and eventually got them to check whether it was authenticated and it was not. That solved my problem and this card now works.

I can't compare the cards for speed. That will take a long time, in different cities and locations and while driving. Some cities are 300 Kb for the Verizon card and some are roughly 50 Kb, as I recall, maybe 100 Kb.

Friends of mine have Sprint cards (the number 301 sticks in my head) and have good access at maybe 300Kb or higher most places. I think the rate for that one is also $80 pre month. You have to get it working on a PC and then it works in a Macintosh, I'm told.

If you can only afford one card, consider reception where you'll use it most, which cell carriers work well there. It may be that in some rural areas a particular card does not work. If you don't have a friend using one particular card, consider purchasing it in a store instead of online. Real humans can help you with answers to questions like where it works in your area and other issues.
-- 

Best regards,

Steve  (ok a new size tv)
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