Mobile Cellular Modems

[Roberty]

A friend of mine has a tour bus company and is looking at possibly getting something for his buses so that the people on the bus can connect with hi-fi on their laptops while traveling down the road. Any ideas about what would work the best such as a 3G or 4G card from a wireless carrier such as Verizon along with a cellular modem of some type? I did some digging around and found some products that might work that are made by CradlePoint but I'm not sure if this would even work in his situation.

 

[keenan]

An Android 2.2 phone?

There are actually quite a lot of devices coming on the market now that can do this all prepackaged in a nice box. Verizon MiFi is one such consumer offering, though there are plenty of other non-branded devices.

It's also a supported feature in pfSense 2.0 betas, so you could get the USB modem stick from your provider, an ALIX board and WiFi card and go that route. Some versions of dd-wrt might also support this on routers with USB ports.

 

[heatlesssun]

For this to work well in motion you'd probably need a couple of 3g connections, the bandwidth isn't going to ne great for more than one or two devices connected to it, at least that's my experience with Verizon's 3G.

 

[keenan]

A couple years ago I used an EDGE card on the bus regularly and never had significant dropouts or issues. 3G may be worse, but voice is far more stringent on availability and transmission time than data is, so I don't see how it can be that bad, since voice works just fine in motion most of the time.

Or maybe Verizon's network just sucks

 

[mustang_steve]

tethering ot a phone.....cabled is best. bluetooth to phone is laggy, and 3g can be laggy......both makes for some serious latency issues.

Now for 3g adapters and cards....go with the internal card if your computer supports one, they tend to work SO much better.

 

[swatbat]

I've seen some commercial setups of this before but I was under the impression they used a few cards to work. Really you are looking at an expensive setup. Need to get with verizon and check on what the rates would be. Depending where you are expect 600k to 1.2 megs down per card. Really running more then a computer or 2 off one gets slow fast.

 

[Sly]

Try contacting your mobile provider and ask if they have a device you're looking for.

Ours actually has a data plan that includes a mobile wifi router. So you can basically stick in in your bus and everyone with a wifi inside will be able to access it.

http://www.yugatech.com/blog/telecoms/smart-bro-share-it-wireless-router/

Wifi Router and 3G/HSDPA modem in one. Price: $21.00 a month, unlimited hours, free wifi/3G router, 24 month lockin period. Downside: Horrible Coverage.

Your mobile provider may have a similar package already so i strongly suggest asking them first.

 

[DanNeely]

The mi-fi can only attach a handful of computers at once. Unless you're not expecting to ever have more than a handful of people connecting you should talk to your local wireless companies; a bus with a few dozen laptops will probably need something with more bandwidth than a consumer oriented device can provide.

 

[Dew]

I have a CradlePoint PHS-300. Love it. Truly plug and play. I plug in my 3G modem (Cricket), turn it on, 30 seconds later I have internet. The only disadvantage is that it only allows 16 devices at once(Then again, at 16 users it is going to get pretty slow). Oh, and it gets a little buggy, after 10 hours or so it will drop the modem, simple power cycle fixes it.