We just got back from the mall where we learned that as of Thursday 6/23/2005 Verizon now has their EVDO broadband wireless available in the greater Seattle area! I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, it was great to hear and we wasted no time putting down the $184.95 and committing to a two year contract at $79.99/month + tax. Oh, and there is a $20 activation fee and pro-rated charges so the first bill (due in the first week of August) rolls in at $131.67.

The salesmen told us that this is activated in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and the greater Puget Sound area. He said it goes all the way up to Blaine, which is just near the border of Canada.

So I got back home and fired up the CD to install on the M1400 Tablet PC. The install of the software completed withouta hitch. I loaded up the connection manager and then … uh oh. The process froze right when it asked me to install the PC card. Just hung there “waiting for me to add the card.”

The LED light was blue on the card so there was definitely power and Windows made that da-duh beeping sound when you plug or unplug hardware. This was where Windows plug and pray becomes plug and pray. Windows couldn’t find the drivers even when I pointed it to the drivers. I was in the device driver hell. Argh.

So I dialed up Verizon and expected not to get anybody, but a really nice tech support gentleman answered and he was extremely courteous as he tried to help me navigate the device driver purgatory. No such luck on the M1400, it wouldn’t fire with the software.

I suggested that we should my older laptop, a Sony Vaio. The installation of the drivers and software worked fine and then it was onto the connection manager. The process froze up again when it came to plugging in the PC card.

The technician suggested we pull out the card and reinsert. We tried switching between the two different ports. No luck. While he looked manuals and consulted others, the phone call pushed the 45 minute mark and still no connectivity. I kept trying pulling the card out, waiting and then reinserting.

Plug and pray, plug and pray, plug and pray.

About the tenth time — and I have no idea why — it finally did something different and moved onto finding different hardware. We had gotten through the plug and play portion!

After installing all the device drivers it then went in and rebooted. When it came in again, it went to the VZaccess online screen. The UI of this thing is terrible. There is this gigantic Connect button that looks like you would press that to connect but then that’s just an indicator for show, it’s not the actual link you need to press. The actual connect button is beneath it and you click on that to login and get rocking.

The first thing I noticed was that web pages were loading really slowwww. I told the technician. I mean, when Google’s home page isn’t firing fast, you know something is wrong.

He suggested maybe it was the compression software that comes with it and that I should uninstall that. I did that. Didn’t even write down the name (viper?) Something with a V anyway. Did that and then reconnected.

I checked the speed using the Wugnet speed tester: 46.6k … ugh!

Wheels started turning and I’m already thinking: no way is this broadband. It’s like I went in a time machine back to 1997-1998. I asked: could this be right? Was the salesman wrong to tell me that broadband was available in this area? The technician asked for zip codes and I started firing a bunch of them off:

98373? No. 98374? No. 98375, 98445 … all no, no. He went on to say that according to his coverage the greater Seattle area wasn’t activated for broadband service yet.

Felt my heart sank a bit. I wasn’t mad at any part of this conversation, BTW. This was a very pleasant exchange as far as the purchase, the tech support call and my experience. No sense getting mad on this one and anyway I was way too excited and geeked up that broadband was going to be available in our area! My thoughts were that maybe it was just something glitched with the recent launch and that the information I was given was accurate.

The end of the call was that the technician was going to get his hands on a Tablet PC and do some testing and also find out more info on the coverage and get back with me on this tomorrow.

We’re heading out now and I’m taking the laptop to see if I can get true broadband wirelessly anywhere in Seattle. I’ll report back my findings later. I should be able to blog from the road!

• Kyocera KPC650 EVDO card “doesn’t work with Tablet PCs” … huh?
• Seattle is the most WiFi enabled city
• In over my head networking a Minolta Fiery X3E CN3102e printer
• Stolen cell phone watcher
• Brother MFC-240C scanning
• Motion Computing Drivers