Cell Phone Plans With Aircards

Wireless modem aircards are the way you free yourself from the tyranny of the WiFi hotspot. With an aircard, your laptop computer suddenly becomes a mobile computer. But how do these work and what types of service plans do you need to use aircards?

An aircard is basically a digital two-way radio. But it’s a special kind of radio. Its signals are digital computer data rather than telephone calls.

But aren’t aircards set up to run on cell phone networks? Indeed they are. Right now the vast majority of wireless modem aircards are designed to meet one of the two major cellular broadband standards. Those are EVDO for Sprint and Verizon Wireless or EDGE and HSPA for AT&T and T-Mobile. There is another standard called WiMAX that is just being deployed in major cities by Clearwire.

As you may have surmised, you need a cellular service plan to use the cellular network. For an aircard, you buy what is called a data plan. That’s different from the voice plan that you would order for normal cell phone operations. The data plan gives you full time access to the provider’s nationwide data network. It’s just like having DSL or Cable broadband but without the wires.

There often is one limitation. Because the cellular networks have limited wireless capability, you are limited to a certain number of Gigabytes downloaded per month. For most mobile users the 5 GB limit won’t be a limitation. But if you expect to be downloading a lot of video, especially HD video, you could exceed your monthly limit and have to pay overage charges.

Cellular broadband is not intended to replace a wireline BB connection. It’s really just to let you have access to the Internet while you are on the go. Many business users buy aircards so that they can take their laptops into a customer’s office and make a presentation or enter an order. They can also sit in a parking lot, airport, or restaurant that doesn’t offer free WiFi and be on the Internet.

Most of the newer wireless modem aircards look like USB flash memories and simply plug into your computer using an open USB port. Other models have PCMCIA or ExpressCard connectors. If you order one of these, be sure your computer has compatible ports.

Some devices come with aircards already built-in. These include the new netbooks, which are very small notebook computers designed to run on a particular cellular network or WiFi. The more advanced cell phones or smartphones also give you Internet access without having to buy a separate aircard. That circuitry is included in the radio within the phone. You will have to buy a data plan as well as a voice plan to use your cell phone for both talking and surfing the Web.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans.

High Bandwidth Dissimilar Line Bonding From Mushroom Networks

How would you like to build your own fiber optic bandwidth broadband service without paying through the nose for SONET OC3 or higher level service? Can you do it by kludging together whatever you can find in the way of DSL, Cable broadband, T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, or wireless Internet service? Not very well, and you know it. But what if there was an appliance available where you simply plug-in five or six of your favorite high speed connections of any type and it smoothly merges them into one screaming high bandwidth service?

"Impossible," you say. "We tried that with our routers and it didn't work at all."

Well, what you need is not another router. You need the new and improved Truffles from Mushroom Networks.

Last year, we thought the Truffle BBNA6401 was just the nuts (or fungi) for both WAN reliability and bandwidth expansion up to 50 Mbps. The "BBNA" stands for Broadband Bonding Networking Appliance. It could also mean Broad Band Network Aggregation, which is how the device works. It bonds broadband services to aggregate or combine their bandwidth into the equivalent of one faster line.

T1 line bonding is commonly available from competitive carriers. For every line to bond-in, you get an additional 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. There are a couple of restrictions. It's usually only practical up to 10 or 12 Mbps and all the lines have to be identical and from a single supplier. The carrier supplies you with premises equipment that is similar to the equipment at their central office. That's what runs all those T1 lines in parallel so that you experience the equivalent of a single higher bandwidth line service.

The Truffle looks at that approach as keeping companies in the dark and feeding them fertilizer. Instead, they manage the bandwidth of the lines rather than the lines themselves. By keeping track of what requests go out which lines and what responses are received, the Truffle can mix and match any broadband service into a common bandwidth pool. It doesn't really matter what the characteristics of individual lines are. A DSL and T1 line can be paired, then aggregated with a cable modem signal, a satellite receiver and a wireless cellular aircard. Your composite bandwidth is the sum of the speed that each line transmits and receives.

You can see the advantage of this approach for growing bandwidth incrementally. You start with whatever you can get. Then add services as they become available or you can afford them. In addition to speeding up your WAN connection, you also get a boost in reliability. That DSL line may be moderately fast but flaky. The cable modem is cheap and screams with speed, but drops the connection a couple of times a day and some days goes down for hours. T1 lines are rock solid but the cost per Mbps is way more than with the shared "consumer" grade services. DS3 is fast and reliable but lease prices are in the 4 digits per month. Since it is unlikely that you'll lose every service at the same time, broadband bonding can give you solid connectivity all the time with high bandwidth most of the time.

In addition to the latest speed upgrade, Mushroom Networks now offers several flavors of Truffles for various size businesses and applications. The Porcini BBNA is intended for SMB and enterprise clients, apartments, hotels, hospitals and multi-tenant buildings that want to aggregate several types of Internet connection into one high reliability broadband service. The PortaBella BBNA is for portable or mobile applications. It aggregates the bandwidth of up to 5 USB wireless modem aircards. There's even an optional service offered that makes this solution suitable for high quality video streaming.

Cellular Netbooks Are Downright Cheap

Is most of your computing done on the run? If so, you may be interested in a computer that's optimized for mobile use. That's one of the new netbooks with built-in 3G cellular Internet access.

What's so special about the netbook computer? After all, laptops aren't all THAT big and they do a nice job at the coffee shop.

Sure they do. In fact, if there were no netbooks a laptop with a wireless modem aircard would do the same job. Well, if you don't mind lugging a big padded bag with a big heavy computer with more stuff inside than you really need.

Mobile computing is what netbooks are optimized for. They're about half the size and weight of a standard laptop computer. They have much larger screens than smartphones and full QWERTY keyboards with decent size keys. That puts them a step above smartphones and messaging centric cell phones when it comes to Internet access. They also have hard disk drives, fast processors and enough RAM to run a standard operating system. Two popular models run Windows XP Home Edition.

What netbooks don't have is CD ROM or DVD drives. They're optimized for operation on the Internet, not running sophisticated image manipulation software or playing DVD movies. You can get your multimedia experience online, as needed. Because they're Internet machines, netbooks are gravitating toward having built-in 3G cellular wireless connectivity to augment the standard WiFi access.

What 3G wireless gives you is the ability to use your computer on the Internet wherever you happen to be. Cellular towers transmit both voice and data signals. The wireless modem aircards in netbooks pick up only the data signals, so they are not useful as cell phones. But they will let you browse the web and send email while parked in your car, on the bus or at a client's place of business. Ready to close an order? Pull out your netbook and enter it online while sitting next to the customer.

If you want to buy a netbook, you'll find them priced less than laptops but still in the $300 to $600 range. You can get your netbook for a fraction of that by ordering it along with a cellular data plan. How cheap? How about $49.99 for an Acer Aspire One bundled with a 2 year AT&T 3G wireless plan. The carrier subsidizes the cost of the netbook just like they do on cell phones. You need to commit to a 5 GB monthly data plan for $60 per month.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans. You can also buy these machines without a data plan for more money and simply use the WiFi connectivity in hotspots.

If you would rather have a smartphone or other cell phone with Internet access, such as a BlackBerry, check out the free and low cost options available at Cell Phone Plans Finder right now.