My Newest Toy

A couple of weeks ago I finally went for it. The long debated wireless Internet connection. Months of thorough research about wireless data cards finally came to an end when I bought the Reliance Netconnect Data Card. My options were slim anyways because of the fact that my laptop does not have a PCMCI slot. Therefore I required a USB connection. My options were Tata Indicom and Reliance, since they are the only ones to market the USB card at present. Tata was charging almost 1K higher than Reliance and both were promising the same speed. Of course I knew that the promised speed of 153 kbps is wishful thinking since that is too high a speed to get from GPRS Technology. I also read the endless criticisms posted on the web about how reliance cheats its customers by over promising and not delivering. You can say that for once I decided to get cheated first hand. The sheer concept of wireless Internet connectivity was too sumptuous a prospect and I had to try it.

I have been using the card for a little over 2 weeks now. The USB modem came from HUAWEI Technologies (China). It looks pretty neat and weighs almost nothing. I have opted for a plan called "Freedom at Night" that offers unlimited connectivity and download between 10 pm and 6 am and I thank my lucky stars for choosing this plan. In my daily usage of 2 to 3 hours at night, I am somehow managing to download 50 mb of data per day. That with an uptime of about 85 to 90%. The data transfer speed that I am getting is about 40 to 90 kbps which is pretty decent considering that my office T1 can offer a best of about 250 kbps. The download speed is anywhere between 4 KB and 15 KB depending upon website latency. All in all it is a pretty decent toy to have if you have a nomadic life like me. At least you can get all the junk work and some important work done from home without having to run to a cyber cafe every time. On a lighter side, my Internet connection always seem to work whenever I do some junk work like orkut and Internet radio. It seems to stutter only when I try to get some office work done. Keeps me motivated though.