Dailey News

I took the Acela Express train today from Washington D.C. to New York City. I had my Novatel U720 EVDO.a USB modem with me. I’ve had this for a while but I haven’t had the chance to exercise it on a good long trip, and the three hours on the Acela Express was a good chance to try it out.

You can get the U720 (or Expresscard format cards) from many vendors, but mine is from Sprint. The cost for the card can vary wildly depending on your contract, but the service is about $50/month unlimited. (Whether this is the Limited form of Unlimited as used by Verizon, I’m not sure, but I doubt I’ll use it enough to worry Sprint in any event.

Leaving DC my speeds were great. I was even able to video iChat with my wife and daughter with no problems. (Video iChat going 100mph on a train! Amazing!) Shortly after Baltimore I lost EVDO and dropped down to 1xRTT speed, which is roughly the speed of a 56k dial-up modem. It was still useful for e-mail and light web browsing, but loading a graphics-heavy web page was painful. When we hit Philadelphia I got EVDO service again and kept it all the way to Penn Station.

Here’s my current speed sitting in my hotel room in midtown Manhattan:

As you can see, unless you’re a heavy downloader, the speed is good enough to replace hotel and airport DSL, so the $50 a month could be paid-for pretty quickly if you’re paying hotspot fees more than a few times a month. I also used it on-the-fly when I exited Penn Station and got a bit lost. I went into a nearby Starbuck’s and got my bearings while I sipped a coffee. An iPhone would have been more convenient, sure, but my MacBook Pro is almost always on hand.

If you’ve got Mac OS X 10.4.9 installed, you should have all the drivers that you need to use the U720 or any other supported EVDO gadget. If you’re on 10.4.8 and don’t want to go to 10.4.9 for some reason, you can get the update separately and see the supported hardware list here.

The only criticism I can really make is that the USB version is an ugly black block of plastic. I’ve already lost the removable cap for the USB plug, but it seems sturdy enough to survive in my gadget back without it. Note that while in-use on a MacBook Pro the U720 will cover up either the power plug on the left or the firewire plug on the right. It does come with an ugly Y-cable that will let you use those ports if you want to carry yet another cable around.