Earlier in the year I wrote about my EV-DO PC card – which I still use as a way to stay in touch with the office and the world when traveling across Canada. I have not used it extensively in the US given current roaming rates — but I have used it in a pinch when I could not find a good WI-FI connection or anything else.
More recently, though, we had the opportunity to check out an EV-DO router companion product to the card. Picture this, you put your EV DO PC card into the router and create an instant wireless network (WI-FI) for you and a few colleagues in the courtroom or conference room or wherever you please. Of special note, you can even plug this into a cigarette lighter power adapter and hold your own LAN party at the beach or rolling down the highway in your motor home.
In our testing, we found speeds to be more than acceptable for a few people to share this connection. In any case, it sure beats not having one in some situations. These routers can be found at most of the Bell Mobility stores or through your corporate Bell rep. Here is one good summary I found online.
One more leash has been removed for those of us that cannot get enough of the Net.
For slawyers out there who do not have an EV DO (« Evolution, Data Optimized ») card in their laptops but happen to have a compatible
cellphone or Blackberry with the latest software, they can download Voyageur/DataToGo to use their devices as modems from almost anywhere.
Has any Slawyer ever tried to post on Slaw from the top of the Rockies? ;-)
If you are using your Blackberry, make sure you install v 4.1 of the Blackberry Desktop Manager, reboot and then install the Voyageur software. As I recall there are some tech notes on the Bell website.