Close To Buying The Xps M1210.how Does The Broadband For Cingular Perform?

title says it all.im about a few days away from ordering a xps m1210 with the built in Dell Wireless 5500 Mobile Broadband (3G HSDPA) Mini-Card for Cingular.its an extra $220. and wondered if anyone thinks it is worth it.i currently have cingular for my cell phone so i believe i get some sort of break on the monthly broadband charge.
any comments?

 

Check how much the service costs first. Here in Canada it's an arm and a leg for mobile board band.

 

i did check.for monthly unlimited its $60.00

 

From when I was looking- It's actually unlimited access up to 4-8gb. Anything more and they assume your account is being used for illegal purposes and will cancel your service and assess your early termination fee.

Plus, you'll only see 368k or 512k downloading most of the time with only major metropolitan areas getting to 768. If you read the fine print their promise of megabit download speed isn't a promise, they say it's a theoretical possibility that you will see that speed.

Don't sign up without reading all the fine print on dell's site and cingular's site about the mobile broadband...... Lots of little things that add up quickly.

 

It's not unlimited. Verizon kicked me off.

What they kind of mean, sort of is... you can do something lightweight like check your e-mail an unlimited amount of times. What you can't do, is what I did, download SuSE linux, watch streaming video from C-Span, and similar sites, etc.

It's a useful speed though.

Personally, I don't think they should be allowed to use "unlimited" in their marketing. I asked the sales chick straight out, I can use this for whatever? She was like, yeah, I'm a hottie, and I just graduated college, and sure, whatever, I want this sale, so, whatever you just asked me, I just told you what you wanted to hear. I was like, oh hellz yeah, this is America, we're both hotties and we got mad money and phat beats, and let's do this. So, I forked out, at the time, pretty good cheese for the card, and 3-4 months later I got a phone call interview followed up by a termination letter.

I was like... bummed.

 

Wow, that sounds like some BS going on right there. I would have reported them to the BBB.

 

Yeah, the unlimited thing is totally deceptive.

I understand why they want to limit it (it's a low capacity, pretty expensive network), but, they need to be more clear about it and set firm limits and give you tools to monitor your useage. I feel like I paid a lot of money for the card, and then they gave me the boot.

Since I thought it was unlimited, I got it instead of cable internet for the house. I don't watch much TV, so, it seemed like a good deal to me. After they canned me, I had a $200 card that was worthless, I can't even sell it for $25 on Craigslist, and then I had to get cable internet anyhow.

Plus, I was not a total jerk about it, most of the heavy downloading I did in the middle of the night, not in the daytime business hours.

 

wow,good points.im a ebay seller so accessing my email as well as surfing ebay and the web outside of home and work is important.since i already have a desktop at home,not only was i going to use the laptop anywhere in the house to surf the web and such,i was going to run it to my reciever and listen to all the youtube videos i wanted to.but.since i guess im somewhat limited,maybe ill just end up getting a router for the home.

edit: now im stumped.what if im not at home and i want to just watch youtube all day,will i be limited?
hhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

It's useful, and you could do a lot with it, but... it's wrong to think that you would have unlimited mobile broadband access.

It does say you can't watch or listen to streams, and they asked me point blank if I was stealing music.

The streams thing was fine print, so I just missed it. That would have been a decent red flag had I caught that.

 

can i assume that i can enable and disable the cingular braodband whenever i want such as just using my router?

 

You have to go to the software and hit connect. When you are done you hit disconnect.

So, yeah, you have total control when you are on it.

At least that how it worked with my card based V620 and Verizon software.

It is not "always on."

 

i just checked the plan again.wierd,they charge 59.99 for a 2 year unlimited plan for data connect,but then they offer you wifi service for the hotspots for additional $$?wtf?
http://www.cingular.com/midtolarge/data_connect

 

count_schemula, thanks for the useful info... AMERICAN ADVERTISING ALWAYS TRICKY. Luckily they're not being sued for using wrong words on advertise.

 

CNC GUY,

You might want to buy the 5500 card from someone on ebay. You can get them as low as $99, instead of $220 Dell wants. I've bought a few 5700 cards (Verizon) from ebay sellers. They work fine, and activate fine.

 

thanks for the tip.here all along i was thinking it was something preloaded like sony has,not thinking it was an actual card sticking out.