USB EVDO Modem Without PCMCIA

David Ciccone writes to tell us that he got a first look at Sprint's new USB EVDO card. The new USB wireless card can help users connect their non-PCMCIA equipped devices to the Sprint Power Vision Network. Very few details are available for the card, but David was able to capture a few pictures and the couple of speed tests he ran seem halfway decent.

I have the PCMCIA version but...

[erroneus]

...my laptop sees it as two USB serial devices anyway. My guess is that this device is the same as mine but has less hardware. (I use mine under Linux and the machine sees the device as /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1) One of the first questions I asked myself was "why didn't they just make it a USB device?"

Another responder rightly notes that many phones with a data plan already have the ability to do "internet" for computers via a bluetooth link. Mine does that too. So why do I have a sprint card? My job got it. :) It's good though ... fairly fast though I rarely use it.

Re:Why oh why?

[crazyjeremy]

There are several reasons. ... Seriously, what are you going to do about? Not use wireless?

Well, there are choices. All carriers bite you in one way or another, but one alternative option is EDGE through T-Mobile for $30/mo added on to your existing line. I think the V360 works fine for this purpose and allows Bluetooth DUN with no problems. I've used the V330 in the past with GPRS, but it's just to slow.

I think UMTS via Cingular or Tmobile would be the only service speedy enough to compare to EVDO from Sprint or Verizon, but I'm not sure if that's even available... even if it is, I don't if any UMTS phones can/will allow Bluetooth DUN.

You can already do this with an EVDO-enabled phone

[Yossarian45793]

I have a RAZR V3c, and Verizon's EVDO service, and I've have been plugging my notebook into my phone using a USB cable for months. The download speed are up to 2 Mbit/s and that's not exaggerating (you do need a strong signal, though).

Re:Why oh why?

[andymadigan]

According two verizon, two of their phones do support bluetooth DUN

Re:seems a bit useless

[aesiamun]

the new intel macbook and macbook pro systems do NOT have a PCMCIA.

This might be welcomed to people who own these systems.

Re:seems a bit useless

[NixLuver]

'enabling dhcp to share the connection'? When did dhcpd start routing?

In other news - many new laptops do not, in fact, include the archaic PCMCIA/PCCARD interface; the new one is "Express-Card", and it's not compatible, backwards or forwards or sideways. Nobody, noway, nohow. But they have USB connections GALORE.

Great, they support both operating systems

[Trelane]

Windows and Mac.

Any word on Linux?

Re:Why oh why?

[garcia]

It's plain old "people will pay for it" nothing more. If people would stop sending SMSs at .10/min and would stop paying astronomical rates for SMS plans then they would drop the prices.

Unfortunately, too many people are obsessed with sending MMS and SMS and have no qualms about paying big bucks to do it.

Re:Great, they support both operating systems

[pamdirac]

I'm not sure about this device. I just bought the Sprint 5740 card (PCMCIA) which is apparently sold by Verizon as well. Linux is not supported, but it is actually easier than Windows to setup. Some people claim you have to activate the card under Windows. I bought mine pre-activated, but I set it up in Windows anyway (had to borrow a laptop) to find out my user name to use in wvdial. I'm guessing if I knew that, Windows would not have been a requirement.

I used this post http://kenkinder.com/evdo-pc5740/ [kenkinder.com] to configure. wvdial wound up working better than pppd for me (Dell Inspiron 9300/FC5). In any event, the cool thing is that under Linux there was nothing to install. My card was autodetected as a usbserial device, and I simply configured wvdial to use it as a modem. Who knew we would be going back to dialup and gladly at that?. I did have to apply a kernel patch to get a performance boost though.

I guess this doesn't directly answer the question, but it may give you an idea of what to expect and what to look for. The short answer is that these devices seem (mostly) to just work under Linux, but under Windows you have to install specialized software and drivers to use the cards which actually was a PITA.

Re:Why oh why?

[mr_zorg]

I use my a900 via Bluetooth with my MacBook Pro all the time.

As do I, though you have to unlock it first, it's not hard to do. One thing I did notice is that if you're in a good signal area, you get about twice the speed if you use a USB data cable instead of bluetooth. It seems (sadly) the A900 is a bluetooth 1.x device, and that just doesn't have the same bandwidth. With bluetooth the best I can do is about 400Kbps, but with the USB data cable I can get over 800Kbps. Pretty rockin'...

Re:What I'm waiting for

[pimpimpim]

As strange as it sounded to me, there apparently was already a PCMCIA version [slashdot.org] running the USB EVDO [slashdot.org] interface. So the title is very factual and correct.

Complainers: do your fact checking.