Playing on the road....in the passenger seat
 

In a few months I might make the drive w/ my girlfriend from California to Michigan and we'd hit some casinos on the way (suggestions for good B&M $1-$2, $2-$5 and $5-10NL games?) and we'll also play online. During the down time I'm thinking that the passenger can play online, but that brings up a few questions:

1. Who has the best/largest broadband coverage? I'm guessing Verizon, but that's just because I have cell phone service through them. In all reality I don't know anything about broadband coverage, who offers it or if it is available literally anywhere so any help would be appreciated.
2. How fast is the service? Is it more comparable to dial up or cable modem>
3. Has anyone tried playing while traveling before? How difficult/nauseating is it?
4. Is there any software you would suggest to help me multitable (other than pokerace and pokertracker) party and Empire?
5. Is it likely that we will encounter too many dead zones or is broadband different in that way from cell phone service?

Re: Playing on the road....in the passenger seat
 

There's a thread around here talking about this. People playing on the Greyhound or whatever. There's some card you can buy for your laptop from Verizon that was supposed to be pretty good.

Look around, thread shouldn't be more than a few weeks old...

Re: Playing on the road....in the passenger seat
 

I was curious so I did a few searches for that thread. This is all I could really come up with. Satellite internet connection

Re: Playing on the road....in the passenger seat
 

[ QUOTE ]
In a few months I might make the drive w/ my girlfriend from California to Michigan and we'd hit some casinos on the way (suggestions for good B&M $1-$2, $2-$5 and $5-10NL games?) and we'll also play online. During the down time I'm thinking that the passenger can play online, but that brings up a few questions:

1. Who has the best/largest broadband coverage? I'm guessing Verizon, but that's just because I have cell phone service through them. In all reality I don't know anything about broadband coverage, who offers it or if it is available literally anywhere so any help would be appreciated.

[/ QUOTE ]

Since I have extensive experience being the passenger playing online poker in the MD/VA/DC metro area with a carpool friend (and he also does play online when I drive), I can try to give some information here. First, I used my work's Verizon PCMCIA PC5220 card on a laptop and I enjoyed consistent connection with 2 or 3 expected loss-of-signal-connectivity during the 1-hour commute in the same areas. Later, I got a free laptop of my own and then I looked around for reasonable monthly service so I chose T-Mobile's $29 monthly "Internet plan" and purchased a Sierra GC79 PMCMIA card (not sure I got the model number right). I noticed with T-Mobile's service, I got more loss of connectivity across more spots than Verizon & it seemed like Verizon was simply better with keeping signal alive while being mobile. Though, Verizon's service, last time I checked was $59 monthly (it was higher in the past...).

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2. How fast is the service? Is it more comparable to dial up or cable modem?

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It is VERY comparable to dial-up, but can be better than 28.8k but less than 53k. I have downloaded a couple of MB files before via this method.

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3. Has anyone tried playing while traveling before? How difficult/nauseating is it?

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The experience itself is like playing on dial-up.... just needing some patience sometimes.... SUGGESTION: NEVER play any NL tables via national wireless... just play Limit tables or tourneys. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] I got flamed/almost reported when I hit Q flop AND heart draw with QT hearts, and hitting 3rd heart at turn, but someone had hit his ace nut heart draw and I lost connection EXACTLY at that time. Good thing the table had already realized I was slow sometimes and did lose connection once a few orbits beforehand... (*sorry for the babbling in reminiscing an old memory, heh*)

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5. Is it likely that we will encounter too many dead zones or is broadband different in that way from cell phone service?

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First, Verizon does have two "levels" of broadband national wireless speeds. In select cities, the broadband is comparable to office/home LAN, very good speeds. But for most part, the connection you get is through their GSM/GPRS network just like cell phone service. Second, there may be quite few dead zones going across country... I have a T-Mobile Sidekick II e-mail pager, and it does not have service in some of those stretches of long highways trips, FYI.

* CalvinTy