Fido is losing money on me / Sierra Wireless AC860 on Vista!

Written by  on November 26, 2006 

Along with my Windows Vista installation, I have managed to hack the Sierra Wireless AC860 card into my spanking new laptop.  I have spent this entire weekend (ok, not quite the weekend, but I need the literary flair) re-installing Vista, and after trial and error got the wireless card running on the machine.

There’s a secret with this wireless card – the 3G watcher isn’t 100% compatible with Vista.  The folks at Sierra Wirelsss posted a knowledge base article that walks you through how to install the 3G connection as a Dial-Up Connection (DUN). This is what I would have done if I had a 1900/850 HSDPA phone. After this step, launch the 3G Watcher, select the DUN connection and watch it fly!

Hence my post – Fido is losing money on me.  I just racked up 30MB of transfers in under 5 minutes.  Imagine – even at $0.01/kb at pay-per-use, my bill would have been $300!  Too bad for unlimited North American roaming – it’s just $50/month for the kind of abuse I’ll be putting this guy through.  Even if Fido capped the speed to 48KB/sec (as compare to Rogers’ 150KB), the latency is so much lower than EDGE.  We can definitely proclaim that Canada (Toronto) has a real metro-wide wireless Internet network!

Category : mobileUncategorized

Comments

One Response

  1. Angela says:

    Hey Alan, nice to see that you are blogging as well! Ryan has a blog site as well. It’s about time guys!