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Does anyone have experience playing WoW using an aircard? Sprint offers an unlimited service and the Ovation U727 air card has gotten nothing but good reviews. I'm thinking about the service for downtime during the day at work when I have nothing else to do. Can't play games on the work network. I know I can't possibly multi-box with it, but it would soothe my WoW addiction. :)
I've no view on your work situation, but I'd keep WoW away from work, especially if you are even admitting you are addicted. :p
Just my two cents, I'm not experienced with aircards and am unable to respond to this thread with anything interesting, I'm aftraid. x(
Just my two cents though. :P
I use my cell phone with tethering service enabled while I'm at work for general browsing. I actually find I do quite a bit work-related browsing on it (Blogs are blocked by the work network - guess where lots of very good information about coding comes from?) Anyways, I have tried booting WoW before, and aside from the fact that have far too much work to do to be playing WoW at work, the latency is pretty high. Somewhere between 600 and 800 average if I remember correctly. I don't think aircards get better speeds, they're on the same network after all.
If you have a cell phone, be sure to look into tethering service. It's usually around 20-25$ on your cell bill, which is more cost effective than getting a separate account set up for an air card you can't use for cell calls too.
The Ovation Air Card is totally separate from a phone service. In fact, I won't have a Sprint phone at all. The air card is a USB device that simply plugs into your computer and has "supposedly" near broad band speeds although I'm sure that there are plenty of factors. The 30 day trial will decide all that.
Thanks for your concern about WoW at work, but I'm actually pretty stable. I do computer support and I have a lot of dead time on my hands sometimes. I think I'll be OK. :) I'm also 47 years old and know when to do what. /wink
Yeah, I know what an air card is, I'm just saying that if you have a cell phone, it's more cost effective to just add tethering to your service plan. I'm 99% certain that air cards use the same data network as cell phones (EVDO) so your speeds are going to be around the same. Just to warn you, Sprint's definition of "Near-Broadband" is usually around 150-200 kbps, from my experience with them. My average transfer rate for downloading files via HTTP was about 9kps, and as I mentioned my pings hover between 600 and 800.
Of course, nothing is more constant in this word than me being wrong, so if you do try it out (30 days free sounds like a no-risk situation) let me know if your results are different. 8o
There is also a difference between your phone wich might be 2.5g Or Edge wireless and the new 3g Known as UMTS
the 3g UMTS has way faster speeds than the 2.5g Edge signal. But then again the ping time is still pretty high due to the amount of travle to the server
Aircard to tower tower to the splitter then to the internet you wont get fast ping with that amount of travle time.
I use to work at cingular as a tech rep :}
OK, lot's of technical phone lingo being thrown around in here that I honestly don't feel like researching since I'm multi-boxing and researching that most of the time. Anyway, I went out and got one today. Had some problems getting it activated for some reason or another. Had to do it manually with third level tech support, but here at home a single copy of WoW works fine. lag was around 500 with not such a good signal, but still plenty playable. FPS was low also but it was on my my semi-crappy laptop.
Once I get to work (with better signal) I'll post a report on stats. Until then.... Woot!
:thumbsup:
Very happy camper here. Although in my office I don't have that great of a signal (the EVDO indicator is not on) the latency is generally 800ms or better. Near my office in my car, where I'm at a lot, I get the EVDO indicator and the latency in game is only around 250-350ms. Very nice indeed. Using the www.speakeasy.net speed checkers I'm getting around 1100 download speed.
Hell, once I get my other laptop out, I may break down and do a little dual boxing with it. I'm finding out that after five boxing, single boxing is just plain old dull.
Johnny