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George

On 10/11/2011 4:30 PM, wrote:
On Oct 11, 9:28 am, Art wrote:
I'm looking for a cell modem/service for a laptop to be used when
traveling. It would be nice to be able to shut off the service when not
using it without huge penalties. Anyone here using such a beast.
Thanks.

All the major carriers offer some sort of pay-as-you-go data plan.

The only problem is, the data blocks you buy are "use it or lose it."
You have X days to use the data block, depending on the size you
purchased.

With pay-as-you-go cell phones you buy the minutes and they're good,
period. You can buy 60 minutes of airtime, use the phone for 5
minutes, come back a year later, and the 55 minutes are still there.

If there was a data plan like that, I'd be all over it.

The cell operators are really competitive on minutes but they know data
is their future.

It seems a few days of pay as you go will buy a month of service.

I used to have an aircard and a smartphone. I turned the aircard off
when I got the my latest smartphone. I almost never use the notebook
anymore because I can do almost everything on the smartphone. If I do I
can tether from the smartphone and the smartphone data plan is 50% of
the aircard dataplan.