What is the best wireless broadband service?

I just got a new laptop and now I need to sign up for a wireless broadband service. The main 2 I am looking at are Verizon and Sprint, but I have no idea how their service is. Does anyone have any experience and can offer some advice? I am in the military, so I need to have a plan that offers wide coverage in many areas. Price isnt really an issue.

 

Are you talking about wireless over a cellular connection, ie, with an EVDO PC Card?

EVDO is the current standard for both VZW and Sprint, but won't offer nearly the bandwidth as a typical DSL/Cable modem, so take the 'wireless broadband' monikor with a grain of salt. There are also some latency issues, which shouldn't be a problem for email/browsing, but don't expect to get good performance for network gaming, if that's what you had in mind. VZW probably has EVDO deployed in more markets currently, but Sprint has already started rolling out thier 'Rev. A' service, which is a little faster than the original 'Rev. 0' that both carriers have deployed. In areas where there is no EVDO coverage, you will be dropped down to 1xRTT, which is ~144kbps. Also, I don't believe either carrier offers a card in the newer ExpressCard format if you need it, only PCMCIA. Expect unlimited plans on both networks to be around $70/mo. Also note that both are CDMA-based, so the network won't be readily available outside the US. If by 'many areas' you mean overseas, you may want to check out Cingular and thier 3G data cards using GSM networks.

www.howardforums.com is a good resource for cellular info, and both the VZW and Sprint forums have a sub-forum for Data-centric devices.

 

Also note that there is an issue with VZW, where although they say their service is unlimited, they might actually cap-off your data transfer at around 5gb/month. Something about a user had his contract terminated because he was using the service to transfer a lot of data. At least that is what some people are saying, or so I heard. You might want to check that out.

 

I meant "Real broadband" in that it doesn't hold a candle to the 9Mbps download I get w/ my cable service, though uploads are probably comparable, and it is faster than dial-up, if that's your definition of broadband.

 

I would say your decision should be based primarily on where you will be the most and their coverage in that area. Sprint or Cingular are the two that I would be looking at. I wouldn't bother with Verizon unless you don't plan to download a lot of data on the laptop because they are aggressively enforcing their 5GB/month policy and terminating accounts that go over. So far Sprint and Cingular haven't imposed many restrictions from what I've seen. I went with Cingular since they have the best coverage in my area and when you're on a 3G network Cingular's HSDPA should offer you faster speeds than Verizon/Sprint's service last I checked. Cingular's deployment of 3G networks supports up to 3.6Mb/s out of the box and Cingular has plans to increase those speeds within the next 1-2 years. I'm considering moving to Tulsa, OK this next summer which has a 3G network and I will look forward to the blazing wireless speeds. Keep in mind that when you're outside of a 3G broadband area that you will get much slower speeds on Verizon/Sprint's 1xRTT and Cingular's EDGE network. At my current location out in the country I'm not too far from a Cingular tower and so I get around 4-5 bars signal strength and pull around 200-250kbs max download speeds with EDGE. I would personally suggest Cingular if you have good Cingular coverage in your area because currently HSDPA will be faster than EV-DO and EDGE will be faster than 1xRTT.