Wireless ethernet ("WiFi" "2.4ghz" "802.11a/b/g") is akin to a cordless phone.

You have to have a base station to connect to. It is NOT a cellular phone that works (practically) everywhere. Your range is ~300m (100m gives you full bandwidth, but up to 300+m will give you a slower speed but still work).

Some cities have set up 'free' wireless all over town. This consists of hundreds if not thousands of WAPs (Wireless Access Points) networked together. More likely you're going to be able to pay $whatever to sit down in $coffeeplace to use the WiFi there or buy a WAP ('home broadband wireless router' etc.) to use it at home on the back porch/couch/kitchen counter/wherever.

As others have said CoSpgs is probably not set up for the free wireless everywhere, so you'd have to go with a cellular modem PCMCIA card.

You pay $whatever for the card and $whatever a month to have internet access anywhere you'd have cellphone service. This is... not as fast as WiFi (whch is ~11mbps, bottlenecked by whatever the WAP is plugged into) and more likely several hundred if not dozen Kbps. It's akin to being on a 56k dialup modem (though GPRS is better-ish) that's finicky about cell tower handoffs and such. It's a viable solution, but not as good as WiFi. Fortunately cell phone tech has gotten small enough to fit in a PCMCIA card, as the old 'cellular modems' actually had to plug into a cell phone and you had to have a model/brand-dependent cable to plug the modem into the phone. They charged you airtime rates ($$$$$$ back in the day) for every minute online. Now it's just like any other cell phone with 'internet access' and is usually a flat rate/month or charged by the MB downloaded.


As for 'two types of PCMCIA slots' the only two standards I know of are PCMCIA and Cardbus(32). PCMCIA is similar to ISA and CardBus is similar to PCI. Both have been around for a long time (my 5+ year old Compaq Armada has Cardbus slots) and CardBus slots are backwards compatable with PCMCIA slots. Any modern laptop should have CardBus slots. If there's something new out there, it's probably similar to PCI-X or something and is more than likely backwards compatable or the laptops with it will die a horrible death in the market. If it physically fits, it should work.

Verizon is CDMA with their own 'broadband' implimentation on top of it, T-Mobile is true GPRS but needs the GSM backbone to work on top of. One will give you better fallback and coverage at the cost of speed, the other vice-versa. Forgive me if I don't remember which.




Hopefully that explains some things. If not, blame the lack of sleep and/or beer.