You can "tether" an ordinary cellphone to act as a wireless modem for your laptop. You need to subscribe to a data plan. I think that each cellphone company allows tethering; possibly some (Verizon?) charge more to allow tethering than just the data plan. For most cellphones, you set up a "connectoid" for dial-up networking on your laptop, using special initialization strings supplied by the cellphone company. For smart phones running Windows Mobile, it's simpler, using a built-in application called Internet Sharing.