I recently bought a couple of cheap (~$120AUD, shipped) 3G cards on eBay. Both work fine however I thought that I'd post about my experiences and mention some tips for young players. I'll cover the first card, a Sierra Wireless MC8775, in this post. I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, when I have more experience with the new card I shall post about it.
I bought them to use in my new Dell E6500 laptop running Vista x64.
The first was a Sierra Wireless MC8775, however the device I received was a HP branded HS2300 unit. After trying lots of drivers, I ended up getting the slightly older HP drivers working. Searching on HP's site for HS2300 found suitable drivers, however the later ones didn't install properly for me, its possible that they are locked to HP hardware.
There are some drivers included with the Generic Watcher, too, but these only cover Sierra's own brand products.
You can download HP the driver that worked for me from here.
You then can get the Sierra Generic Watcher app from here.
If so inclined you can get later firmware using the link in this post. Ignore the Watcher and driver link, though.
The MC8775 is a HSDPA single antenna device so it only supports 3.6Mb/sec but it does get quite a good signal using either of the two antennas in the E6500, better than my iPhone on the train, for example.
You can configure the Watcher profile type to Autoconnect and to not turn off the radio on exit. This way the Internet connection is "always on". You would want to keep an eye on your ISP quota, though.
Overall I'm quite happy with Optus' coverage on my commute and based on my iPhone experience (which is also with Optus) the coverage should be pretty good out on the road as well.
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