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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: EDVO For the MacBook Pro
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Feed Description: Jared's weblog.
The web site was created after the launch of the book "Ship It!" and discusses issues from Continuous Integration to web hosting providers.
I finally ordered one of the EDVO cards for my Mac laptop, but I had an issue that I lost half a day on. I thought I'd share it here and try to save someone else a little time.
I ordered from EDVOinfo.com. They are great... I probably won't need to, but I'd order from them again. Their prices are better than Verizon and they shipped the card the afternoon I ordered it. I placed the order Wednesday after lunch and my card was on my doorstep by 2 pm the next day. How often that does happen when you're waiting for your cool new toy?
My card is the the Novatel V640 and I picked up the Booster Antenna as well. It was half price with my card order. :) And the external antenna helps. It seems to add one bar of signal.
But I only connected once, then I couldn't connect again. The recurring error message was something like "Internal Modem Error. Check your configuration and try again." I was a good customer, and I uninstalled the driver and re-installed before calling... okay, I re-installed four times before I called. :)
One of the good things about the EDVOinfo site is that they offer technical support. When I called in I was pleasantly surprised to find people manning the phone who knew what they were doing. However, after two hours and manually removing old drivers and kext files, they decided it was on Verizon's side and the account had to be reset by Verizon. Normally they could've done reset it themselves but their Verizon person was busy and they thought I could things rolling faster by just calling Verizon directly. In hindsight, that was a mistake!
Turns out Verizon places a lot of stock in error messages... (sigh). If the dialog said it was an internal modem error, it must be! They were fairly certain that if I could just re-install everything One More Time, it would all work out. I declined. It took another hour on the phone with Verizon with tech support that was... well, not up to EDVOinfo's standards. :) I think I moved up through five or so levels before they let me go with a promise that an expert would call me within 24 hours. That didn't happen either.
They finally reset my account on Saturday morning, but didn't call to tell me until 9:30 Saturday night. I knew they reset it in the morning because I kept checking every hour or so until I was able to connect.
So why did I write all this up for my blog? I'm trying to give someone else something to find in the search engines when Verizon doesn't set their account up properly. If it happened to me, it's probably happened to a lot of other people as well.
Of course, now that it's working, it works great. I'm getting ~140 to 200 Kbps downstream and 20 Kbps upstream without the external antenna. The booster antenna jack does block the headphone jack on the Mac, which I use a lot, but that's my only complaint. I'll find out this week what it does to battery life.
It's not going to replace a T1 anytime soon, but I hope to use it on the road tomorrow between here and Denver. I'm hoping that being online (and potentially billable) when I'm traveling will justify the extra expense, but to me it'll be worth the money not to constantly hunting an internet connection when I'm on road. Between airports, hotels, and conference centers, I'm looking forward to just sitting down and checking my email.
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