Technology mobile broadband

[maceo]

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so at the hospital there is wifi but its terrible it gets like .5- 1 mbps.. I need something faster.. Do you think the mobile broadband cards from verizon and at and t are worth it. what are the speeds? which one is the best and most reliable????

 

[TMP-SMX]

If you don't have data service in most parts of the hospital, the card would be useless. So you better make sure you have service there.

 

[nlax30]

Yea, I would first ask around and see what sort of coverage people are getting with verizon, sprint and AT&T in the hospital.

Speed wise it can vary and theoretically should be able to perform a little faster then you're saying the wifi there is doing. Though I probably wouldn't expect a huge difference.

Are you using this with a laptop? The new mifi unit from sprint looks I interesting and has gotten good reviews. Basically just creates a portable wifi network around it you can use, useful if you have multiple devices you'd like to use with it.

 

[nlax30]

Just did a test on the phone here and am getting 1.5mbps on AT&T 3G (Florida with good signal)

Using my wifi at home I'm getting over 5mbps on the phone, so you should be able to do better than the hospital wifi.

 

[DrJosephKim]

Remember that you can also tether with your smartphone. No sense in paying for a dedicated WWAN card if you also carry a smartphone.

 

[TheRealMD]

Remember that you can also tether with your smartphone. No sense in paying for a dedicated WWAN card if you also carry a smartphone.

Dedicated WWAN cards apparently get better speeds than tethering. It's something to do with limiting bandwidth on smartphones, since they shouldn't be using so many anyway.

 

[nlax30]

Dedicated WWAN cards apparently get better speeds than tethering. It's something to do with limiting bandwidth on smartphones, since they shouldn't be using so many anyway.

I think it really has more to do with how you tether. The speed on the phone is not going to be throttled compared to a dedicated card because it's a phone. A 3g phone and a 3g data card are both gonna use a 3g radio chip with 3g speeds. If you tether your phone to your computer using USB the speeds should be comparable, the limiting factor is the wireless speed and not the USB bus. But if you tether over Bluetooth than that Bluetooth connection could limit speeds compared to a dedicated card that's using USB or a PCMCIA slot.