I have the Cingular 860 Aircard by Sierra, picked it up about three weeks ago, haven't seen another one around.

I live in San Francisco, which is covered by the new service. Here are my thoughts so far:

- When you do get a 3G connection, it is great, but you don't get the service everywhere, even in SF. I get it in the office fine, but at home I only connect with Edge (~150k).

- You get about 1000-1100 down, but only about 60k upstream. I tried to use it with Cisco IP Communicator for my office VoIP and the connection was awful and spotty.

- It doesn't give instant gratification. You fire up your computer (I use it on a Thinkpad X31), plug in the card and fire up the Cingular Communications Manager and it takes a good _4_ minutes before you are ready to connect. You can't just whip open your laptop from hibernate and then decide to connect to work really quick and exchange email. The 4 minute wait is painful and is mentioned in the help file that this can often be the case. I've never had it take less than about 3 minutes before it says "ready to connect" even in prime 3G territory with a really strong full-bar signal. I'm not sure what it is doing during this time, but it is kind of like when you turn on your cell phone and it takes a bit to find a carrier/signal, except it takes a looong time.

- It isn't super-cheap, it is like $70/mo for unlimited use. Cheaper than the old Ricochet service, if anyone remembers using that one....?

- One of our guys takes a long train into work in Boston where there is coverage, so I picked it up to play with it to see if it would be something he would want. If he rolls into a tunnel and loses connection, he may be stuck waiting for another 4 minutes before he can connect again - ugh.

I've used the Edge service for about a year now with a Nokia 6230 under AT&T/Cingular and while not fast, beats dialup and was always pretty reliable. This one is much faster, but the long start-up time is really painful on the laptop, maybe if they integrated it into a cell phone or something it might be a little better?

I've had it a couple of weeks now, those were my thoughts so far. Anyone else have any opinions of it?

--Doug