3G Aircards

[gavin310]

Does anybody know if 3G aircards work even where there is no 3G phone service? Finding any solid info on aircards seems to be impossible....

[MJCM]

My guess is that Air Cards are depended of 3G and if there is no 3G available I guess they will fall back to EDGE.

[gavin310]

My guess is that Air Cards are depended of 3G and if there is no 3G available I guess they will fall back to EDGE.

That's my guess too, but I was hoping it worked differently. Right now I can tether my iPhone to my laptop, so I guess I have no use for an aircard. I live on an island with shoddy internet, so I'm trying to find a backup connection other than EDGE if the broadband goes out.

[Pib]

Aircards are really 3G and/or EDGE cards...that is, if a 3G signal is presence they will use that...if no 3G signal they will fallback to using EDGE. During the late 2011 floods I used an AIS 3.6Mb 3G/Edge Aircard along with a month's worth of unlimited 3G/EDGE service...the aircrad worked fine but unfortunately the place I evacuated there was no 3G coverage; only EDGE...averaged around a 200Kb download speed.

[gavin310]

Aircards are really 3G and/or EDGE cards...that is, if a 3G signal is presence they will use that...if no 3G signal they will fallback to using EDGE. During the late 2011 floods I used an AIS 3.6Mb 3G/Edge Aircard along with a month's worth of unlimited 3G/EDGE service...the aircrad worked fine but unfortunately the place I evacuated there was no 3G coverage; only EDGE...averaged around a 200Kb download speed.

Wait, your EDGE connection was getting 200kb download speeds? That sounds like 3G speeds to me? The EDGE connection on my phone gets about 8 kb...

[lomatopo]

Aircards are really 3G and/or EDGE cards...that is, if a 3G signal is presence they will use that...if no 3G signal they will fallback to using EDGE. During the late 2011 floods I used an AIS 3.6Mb 3G/Edge Aircard along with a month's worth of unlimited 3G/EDGE service...the aircrad worked fine but unfortunately the place I evacuated there was no 3G coverage; only EDGE...averaged around a 200Kb download speed.

Wait, your EDGE connection was getting 200kb download speeds? That sounds like 3G speeds to me? The EDGE connection on my phone gets about 8 kb...

You might be confusing Kilo-bits per second and Kilo-Bytes per second?

The theoretical maximum EDGE speed is, I think, 236.8 Kilo-bits per second (Kbps) downstream, or ~ 30 Kilo-Bytes per second (KBps). 200 Kbps is probably the maximum real-world download speed when accounting for overhead and other inefficiencies in packet-based communications. Most people have reported ~ 150 - 180 Kbps EDGE here. GPRS max. is (I think) ~ 80 Kbps.

For the OP, every/any 3G aircard will almost certainly support quad-band GSM data: 850/900/1800/1900MHz for 2G-GPRS/EDGE in addition to any 3G frequencies specced. When not receiving a 3G signal the aircard will fall back to EDGE/GPRS, assuming that is available.