Rent A Mobile Broadband Card For Your Laptop By The Day.

Posted by david | June 9, 2008

I have been considering picking up a wireless internet card for my laptop for a while now, so I can be connected anywhere we go without having to worry about wi-fi hotspots. The cards themselves are free from most providers, but several of them do not offer unlimited access - they cap you at a certain number of MB’s per day. Sprint seems to be the only one that offers unlimited service, but at $50 a month it is not cheap - that’s at least $600 a year (before fees and taxes and probably a multi-year agreement) for something that I probably would not use that often. So what is a good alternative? How about renting a wireless access card by the day or month?

That’s what RoVair.com is doing - renting you a Verizon or Sprint mobile broadband for about $6 a day. Granted, that rate is for renting it by the month, but still - even if I needed it for a full month it would cost me $180, rather than signing up for a multi-year contract that could cost me thousands of dollars. Sounds like a good idea for someone like me who doesn’t travel for work and only occasionally needs broadband service away from wi-fi spots…and maybe it would be good for our train trip this Christmas from Albuquerque to Boston!