Virgin Mobile Broadband 2 Go on a MacBook

I have some trips coming up and connecting to the IBM VPN remotely is always a problem at customer sites. Hardly any of them have a visitor WiFi network I can use and none will allow me to connect to their network. IBM won't either but at least IBM has a visitor WiFi network.

So, I figured a 3G modem would be nice but I don't want a contract. I decided to try the Virgin MC760 USB modem first because it was 99 dollars instead of 250 for the Verizon one. They want $20 for 250MB of traffic. The first model I got wouldn't work on the Mac. It had software for the mac but after installation there was no Broad to go application. Two hours on the support phone later I gave up and returned the device to BestBuy where there was one with Mac Compatible on the box, same model.

That worked. I'd recommend activating somewhere you have WiFi though, it takes forever. I haven't found a 3G signal anywhere around where I live for now. It's just a 1x connection which is about 128kbits/sec. You can't browse at that speed BTW, most web pages are not optimised for such a slow connection.

The IBM Mobility client VPN can connect using this so sametime and notes work, albeit pretty slowly.

This also has me thinking about how much 250MB of transfer really is, it's almost nothing. I get 1MB/5MB emails. Just browsing some sites will burn through that in no time. They are really screwing you on this charge. The monthly contracts are 60 bucks a month for 5Gb which is most reasonable but now thats 700 bucks a year.

I'll try this out next week when I'm in Boston but if there is no 3G signal at the airport in Minneapolis or Boston or at the customer location then I'm tossing it.

UPDATE:

I tried it today at the office. It looks like you can plug it in to any USB port, I used the one on my Cinema Display today. It's a little chunky so you can't plug anything else in to the macbook if you want to use the USB modem. It's too wide to have a network cable, usb cable or displayport connection beside it so a USB extender cable or HUB would be a good idea.

I got a good EVDO Rev A connection at the office, almost all bars. Using speedtest.net I did a performance test and saw 183ms ping times with 0.78mbps for download and 0.43mbps for upload speeds which is lower than claimed but it's still pretty usable for email/IM/twitter and so on.

Comments

[malyn]

will this work outside usa like maybe phil. thanks for the info you shared