Will WWAN work with Alltel?

[JonathanGennick]

I've been looking at the X series models with mobile broadband. I live in an area with no coverage from either Cingular or Verizon. Am I just out of luck then? Does the built in WWAN support work only with those two vendors? Alltel --my current cellular provider -- does provide mobile broadband, but it's through a PC card, and I can't say I'm really excited about having a card stick out the side of my machine.

Wouldn't it be nice if mobile broadband was standardized in the way that 802.11b is? I shudder to think of a world in which WiFi cards were vendor-specific.

[bill bolton]

I shudder to think of a world in which WiFi cards were vendor-specific.

Unfortunately that is largely the case at the moment, and even where its not, there are often significant hoops to jump through to achieve any cross-telco operability.

What sort of data service does Alltel offer... EV-DO, UTMS (etc), and on what frequency band do they offer it on?

Cheers,

Bill B.

[short101]

You should be able to get the unlock code for your wwan card from the network providor or IBM. Though being in the states they probably don't like doing that. If its a new x61, apparently the cards are unlocked. Would pay to email lenovo and tell them that you would love to buy a laptop if the card is unlocked.

I had to sigh when you mentioned the 80211 standard, as IBM lock in their cards with the bios, meaning you cant replace your wireless card with one that isn't approved by IBM. Your bios will throw an error and the machine will refuse to boot.