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.

Comments

Why oh why?

[crazyjeremy]

I understand why people want EVDO/EDGE connections. I even understand why USB is a convenient alternative to PCMCIA connections. What I don't understand is why Verizon, Sprint and Cingular try so hard to keep people from using EVDO/EDGE via Bluetooth DUN connections. If you have a Verizon E815 and a data plan, you can already use this as a modem from your bluetooth enabled PDA or computer. The other carriers have similar devices available. A note though: If you try this this method (using existing phone line) and you do not abuse it (no bittorent) you MIGHT not be caught.

My question is why do they try to force us to buy a second USB or PCMCIA adapter when many of our existing phones will let us connect to the net just fine? Are they greedy? For another another line, hardware purchase, 1 or 2 year contract and $60 - 80 a month fee, Verizon/Cingular/Sprint will sell you these other devices to allow EVDO / EDGE connetions. But why don't they let us use our existing connections that work perfectly well already? (Or at least they WOULD work if the carriers didn't cripple them)

Is it just greed?

Re:Why oh why?

[ip_fired]

Is it just greed?

Yes.
It is just greed. I mean, does a 10 byte text message actually cost 10 cents? If that were the case, then it should be costing me $30.00 per minute to talk to people. It's just plain old greed.

Re:Why oh why?

[f9dc]

There are several reasons. They're not necessarily nice, but these are indeed the facts. 1) Financial reporting. They want you to have an additional line because some of their performance metrics are based on the number of active subscriber lines, rather than the actual number of subscribers. While this isn't as big of a deal with individuals, consider enterprise customers (Microsoft, IBM, etc) who may have 10,000 or more lines. Cumulatively, those make a huge difference in reporting quarterly net subscriber gains, and sometimes even 10k or so is enough to beat the next carrier. 2) Because they can. Seriously, what are you going to do about? Not use wireless? Good luck with that. Although they often allow you to add unlimited data via DUN to your voice plan, they know that they can squeeze out an extra $10/mo per customer if they make it easier for you to just get an additional line. While this sounds unfair and anti-consumer, consider that Verizon Wireless has made this type of behaviour their standard method of operation for years, and they've been wildly successful at it. Consumers enjoy getting screwed and will pay out the nose for it, time and time and time again. 3) Carriers feel that if you have one device for data and another for voice, you'll be more inclined to use the data device more often. It's a psychological thing. I haven't seen the studies first-hand, but having worked for three of the four major national carriers, I can assure you that this is the way they think. #1 is pretty much the main reason. And on #2, Sprint actually has a very reasonable (compared to Cingular and Verizon) offer: $40 to add unlimited DUN to your voice plan, covering both 1xRTT (slower, 144k) and EVDO. Sprint also has no problem with you attaching your device as a DUN modem, as long as you pay for it. I use my a900 via Bluetooth with my MacBook Pro all the time. One caveat to doing this is that you tend to miss incoming voice calls. I know the carriers all say this doesn't happen, but trust me -- it does. All the time.

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.

Re:Why oh why?

[RasputinAXP]

Sprint offers a data plan for tethering or bluetoothing your phone as a modem; it's called the Sprint Phone as Modem Plan and it's an additional $40 on top of your usual fees.

Re:Why oh why?

[andymadigan]

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

Re:Why oh why?

[crazyjeremy]

$40 in addition to any vision / internet fees?

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:Why oh why?

[crazyjeremy]

The unFUNNY part of it is, most Verizon reps do not know the phones even have these features. When you finally do talk to someone who is in the know, they don't have the power to "allow" you to use that device for that purpose. "I'm sorry, we can't add that feature on that device." We battled for months with Verizon and lost. We didn't quite have hundreds of lines, so Verizon didn't budge. In the end Verizon lost out. I could have switched $200,000 a year to them, but they wouldn't budge at all. The closest we got was tethering a blackberry via bluetooth. But not everyone wanted to use a laptop. Some wanted to use a pocket pc or palm device which didn't have USB. So we just left Verizon for carriers that would not be so rigid.

Re:Why oh why?

[blank axolotl]

I don't actually know how it works, but it's not necessarily so simple. There could be an initial cost of simply making the connection,
and then after that the low cost of maintaining the connection. Eg 8 cents to make connection, and then some very small cents/byte after that. Maybe that's why they charge per minute on the minute (at least mine does), so there is a minimum one minute cost.

That said, I still think you're right about greed being involved, the prices don't feel right.

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:Why oh why?

[awol]

Don't even start me on this. SMS actually costs _nothing_ for the carriers. It is all sent via the 146 byte "header" (and I am sure some SMS expert out there will correct the details) that the handset uses to connect to the base station. If the header does not have a message then the bytes are blank. Thank they charge at all is vergin on criminal. ITs like chargin for the air that you breath in a private open space. Just criminal.

Re:Why oh why?

[TheRaven64]

Getting it to and from the base station may be free, but they still have to route it over the network. If it terminates on a landline then (in the UK, at least), there is a normal phone call for the last hop, and the message is read out using speech synthesis.

The cost is non-zero, but it is much less than 10 for 160 bytes. This works out at 64/KB or $655.36/MB. If data really cost the carriers this much then there is no way they could operate. I get 40MB of data included with my plan, and this means I can connect to an XMPP server, handshake, sync my contacts, and message for about half an hour for about the cost of a single SMS.

Re:Why oh why?

[Scarblac]

It is just greed. I mean, does a 10 byte text message actually cost 10 cents? If that were the case, then it should be costing me $30.00 per minute to talk to people. It's just plain old greed.

That's a bit naive. A large telco has a lot of costs that aren't directly related to sending a single SMS message, that still need to be covered by things like SMS messages. Plus it's perfectly normal for them to want to make a profit on top of it all.

Durable?

[Superblargo]

It doesn't look very durable. The antenna should probably be more attached to the modem. Also, I imagine that the USB connector would bend fairly easily. If I was using that setup, I would hook the thing up to a USB extension cable and attach that to the back of the device. It might not be all that attractive, but it's better than breaking it.

Sierra PCMCIA

[spacemky]

I have one of the Sierra Wireless EVDO PCMCIA cards from Sprint. What is interesting about this card is that the PCMCIA card actually has a USB interface internally, which has the EVDO modem attached via USB. It's nice to see that they finally released a full-blown USB version. I wonder how the power consumption compares to this version vs. the PCMCIA EVDO cards.

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.

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: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

[notoriousE]

yeah well they don't count b/c I am jealous and cannot afford one

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: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/ 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.

Great but....

[Cherita Chen]

This is great but they (Sprint/Nextel) still have a long way to go before this technology is relevant to the majority of sprint users. Sprint's EVDO network is awesome when you have connectivity, that being said, for the majority of the United States, service is spotty at best.

Would be good for a MacBook

[doormat]

Since the MacBooks dont have PCMCIA (the Pros have ExpressCard, the regulars have nothing).

Wireless Data Pricing

[iPaqMan]

There are at least 150 Million wireless subscribers in the united states. Lets say that the top 4 wireless companies spend 20 billion on capital investment per year (they don't). The average revenue per user in the US is $50 (conservatively). The wireless carriers capital expenses are paid in the first 3 months. They have to cover their other expenses the next quarter. Where does the money go?

Why are data/voice rates so high?

Why doesn't the FTC go after these bozo's for collusion? They are obviously avoiding real competition because they are afraid of what happened to the long distance industry.

If I can pay $20 for local telephone service, something that requires burying miles of cabling, why are wireless prices so high???

Sorry for the incoherent babbling but I just paid my wireless bill. Just slightly frustrated. :)

Re:Wireless Data Pricing

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

Don't you know how hard it is to build invisible tubes in the air?

What I'm waiting for

[arodland]

Is the USB EVDO card with PCMCIA.

Submitters: learn to write in decent English.
Editors: Edit, dammit. Or reject the crap. Or resign. Or at least change the job title to something less misleading.

Re:What I'm waiting for

[pimpimpim]

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

Complainers: do your fact checking.

TJTMAIOH

[dorianh49]

USB EVDO w/out PCMCIA? TJTMAIOH That's Just Too Many Acronymns In One Headline.