Using the New Express Card from Verizon

For anyone who travels a lot, connecting to the internet when you are on the road is sometimes a pain. I wrote earlier about the problems I had with T-Mobile and their ditzy email responses to a question. But this week I bought one of the new Express Card cellular modems from Verizon. The program is not for the casual user. The card costs under $200 and then the monthly bill is about $80. But the connection speeds are pretty good. It allows you to connect via their National Access Network which is at least four or five times faster than the T-Mobile GPRS network.

As noted earlier I tried several times to get T-Mobile to suggest a device but even though I tried they did not come up with anything useful. Thus, this week when I had a couple of minutes I stopped by a Verizon store and saw the card demoed and then bought one. I have had one problem with the card in the initial start-up but that was resolved by the Verizon technical staff in pretty good fashion.

This card is compatible with the Express card slot for the Mac Probook - and Verizon seems to have taken into account that a pretty good fraction of users who are mobile use Macs. For now this looks to me like a great solution. I will quit T-Mobile completely. I really liked the ability to use the T-Mobile hotspots in Starbucks. One can get a drink and use the network in lots of places. I can still use the hotspots at Starbucks but now I will be on the Verizon network.