Best wireless air card and plan??

My wife got a new, killer job that's going to require us to sell the house and move to a different area. She'll be staying with my mom and her husband during the week while I stay up here trying to sell. Mom's husband has cable for his computer but rather than buying a router and freaking him out with it I figured I'd just get my wife an air card. Sprint, Verizon etc all have coverage in the area she'll be in but breaking it down into the card and the plan, what would y'all recommend?

I work in IT professionally so about 6 months ago I was tasked with selecting a carrier for an enterprise wide rollout.

I looked at primarily the ATT and Sprint offerings, and did some location based testing and ran pings to test response time, get averages etc. Sprint was consistently faster with MUCH better response and ping times. I would never use the ATT card given what I know about the sprint cards.

The Sprint Sierra wireless Compass 597 USB device is amazing, and its about 2x1 inches.

Its remarkably tiny, and the fact that it is USB is great, as if my home ISP goes down, I can pop that sucker in my main PC and be back up until my 12mb is back up

I say its a no brainer, get that card from sprint, the plan is 59.99 and you can probably get the card almost for free.

I have a sprint card with their unlimited data plan. Like $63 a month with taxes and all. I get connections (when the stars are in alignment and I hold my mouth just right) up to 3.5mbit. As good as an average cable connection here.

On average it's 1.5-2mbit.

I have zero complaints. I love it and haven't had any trouble with sprint other than that their website sucks, so don't use it to pay your bill. Mail it in or go to a store.

scubaslick said:

haven't had any trouble with sprint other than that their website sucks, so don't use it to pay your bill. Mail it in or go to a store.

Click to expand...

LOL...I agree. That site blows. But I did actually figure out how to pay my phone bill there. Only took about 6 months.

I have an unlimited Sprint mobile broadband plan, it seems to be the best currently out there. The only problem is that it seems to be getting more and more popular which means it is getting slower as they are not scaling with the demand.

I just got one this week. I went with Sprint. Can't beat it. My work pays for an AT&T aircard for that laptop and the connection is slow as can be.

I had a Verizon air card for over a year and it was slow as hell. It worked, but when I went into the more rural areas of New Jersey there was barely any service. For cell phones in NJ, Verizon is probably the best in service area. I use Sprint for my main cell and it's pretty good until I get into some of the rural areas, but Verizon kicks their ass in that section. I don't have and never had a Sprint air card so I can't comment. It's probably better than Verizon.

The Verizon air card was pretty slow and I can't say that I got speeds like mentioned above either. For me the air card was a little bit better than 56K and slower than DSL. I had DSL for about 5 years.

P.S. I hate Verizon. They have the shittiest customer service in the world.