Cingular 3G cards?
 

Does anyone know anything about the cards Cingular is now advertising as 3G? Are they true 3G as found everywhere else on the planet? Will they work at 3G speeds internationally?

I bought their "Edge" card last year and it was pathetic.


Thanks,

I believe it's EDGE in the US, but UMTS/HSDPA elsewhere (same card). We're (US Citizens) are waiting on the FCC for frequency allocation for "real" 3G.

No, it's bona-fide HSDPA here and it FLIES. You want the Sierra Wireless U860. I've never seen any concrete info on where they have coverage but thus far in Vegas and Austin I've seen downlink speeds up to 1100Kbps. It utterly blows EVDO away. Cingular has leapfrogged Sprint and Verizon to become the highest speed data provider available. IMO if they keep the rollout up they may even surpass sprint in coverage area as Sprint's EVDO footprint is pathetic. Note that the U860 will only do UMTS/HSDPA here in the states as we run UMTS on our standard GSM freqs whereas Europe uses 2100Mhz for 3G. It'll do EDGE anywhere else. Conversely, European 3G equipment won't do UMTS here unless it can adapt to running UMTS on standard GSM frequencies.

Interesting - I can't find anything about coverage on Cingular's web site. Perhaps Vegas and Austin are trials?

The UMTS/HSDPA stuff from Cingular is marketed as "BroadbandConnect". I just got a card last week (and a sweet new 2125 phone) that I can't really use yet since my laptop hasn't arrived. No comment on how it performs yet (can't wait to try it vs. EVDO which I've used from Verizon)

From Cingular's website:

BroadbandConnect service is available in the greater metropolitan areas of Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tacoma and Washington, D.C.

So yes, Vegas and Austin should have some sort of coverage.

http://www.cingular.com/sbusiness/umts

Ok - guess that's why I don't see it ... NYC area isn't one of the broadconnect markets.

Do you know what the plans/availability are for cards that will work on 2100 and 1100mhz ( IE: US & Europe)?

I've had the Cingular Sierra card for a couple of months now. Speed in Washington DC - the high speed network is around 400kpbs, not bad, but not EVDO yet.

Everywhere else, it's using the EDGE network. Only international travel was to Germany, might have had higher speeds in the larger cities, but was EDGE in Landstuhl (near Kaiserslaturn)

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it, can't wait until more of the broadband connect network is built out.

Chose Cingular over Verizon because I didn't care for Verizon's ToS.

Cheers,
Jeff

The card they sell here in the US is the Sierra Wireless U860 which is quadband 850/900/1800/1900 which will do UMTS/3G at any of those frequencies but DOES NOT support UMTS/3G in the rest of the world at 2100Mhz. In Europe, even if 3G exists, you'll be on EDGE or GPRS. It also won't work in Japan at all as that's the only frequency they use. The U850 is is quintuple band. It does EDGE at 850/900/1800/1900 and UMTS/3G at 2100Mhz. This card will do 3G in Europe, Asia and Japan, and EDGE/GRPS in the US. I'm assuming there'll be one card that is UMTS capable at ALL frequencies for the next generation. For now, if you want 3G everywhere, you need two.

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

The four minute connection wait you mention is odd... mine finds the APN in no time (I assume that's what the wait is for, the card finds the signal and then attaches to the APN) and lights up the "ready to connect" button. I don't think I ever waited more than 10 seconds. Perhaps it's a usage issue? I doubt many folks were using UMTS in Houston on Christmas Eve near the Galleria. :D

It's not up to the FCC. Cellular carriers make their own decisions about how to use their frequencies. And they have plenty of capacity.

Hardly. An operator like T-mobile has very very little bandwidth in most places,barely enough for 2G, the "normal" 3G frequencies in the US were already allocated to the Government (2100 and 1700) and at the moment it seems like new phones for 3G in the US will have to be specially developed for newer non-standard 3G implementations.

It's still not set in stone. The US is supposedly working on freeing up the 2100Mhz band for 3G. IMO that is necessary as in many places as Scott said there's just not enough bandwidth. T-mobile locally has just 10Mhz available. That's NOTHING. To run UMTS, they'd have to carve off 5 Mhz of that... and there's no way in heck they can handle any sort of 2G traffic in 5Mhz of bandwidth. It's just not enough.

Doug,

Have your card checked out and also have Cingular ensure the SIM is provisioned properly. In the past two weeks I've used my card in Houston, Austin, Corpus Christi, Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the longest I've taken to connect is 90 seconds. It's also only ever that long the first time I'm firing up the card in a 'new' market. Thereafter it seems to be much faster.