Review of Cingular Wireless

Now on to the network.

In my home town (Reading, PA), the fastest speed I can download is about 70 kbits/sec. Not horrible considering cell phone service is mediocre at best. I was in Scranton and Allentown last week and was able to pull in 300-400 kbits/sec using the UMTS towers in those area's. Surfing the web at 300 kbits is very nice considering its a small device and you don't really go to bandwidth intensive sites. I was able to check on e-mail, read stories on slashdot, digg, and broadband reports while away. The IP Addresses seem to be dynamic in the 166.x.x.x range, but it's really a moot point on a PDA. There is a USB Modem link that will simulate a Cingular PCMCIA network access card, but I was only able to try it out at home. This way of accessing the internet was very slow, but perhaps if in a 3G area it would be sufficient. I did notice that when viewing HTTPS (Secure) sites, the wireless is much slower. Perhaps since the packets are secured, they cannot be compressed any further by Cingular's network management. Overall its a good experience, but the price is pretty steep for unlimited data. Since my company pays for the unlimited voice and data plan, I don't mind having it, but if it was me, I personally wouldn't be able to handle another large bill just for the novilty of wireless internet. Since my job requires it (being a Systems Administrator) I'll take whatever they give me.

As far as the order/install process? Well H.R. department at work handles the ordering, but the device arrived within 2 days. It came inactive and we had to wait on hold for a good half hour to get Cingular to assign it the phone number listed on our order form. Those things should of been taken care of before the device shipped. No bother, the device works fine now. It's easy to install also. Just slide the small sim card in the battery compartment, pop in the battery, close it up and turn it on. I also inserted a 1GB Corsair micro-sd card for storage space.