CCU 650 Sierra 580 preliminary face-off results

Cat telecom of Thailand has made the change from the Sierra wireless 580 card to the C-motech 650.

Sierra wireless was a PCMCIA card and thereby i was dependant upon extra equipment in order for it to work with my macbook pro, which has no pcmcia slot.

My choice for being able to connect this card with my macbook pro fell upon the Topglobal Phoebus MB6000.

I guess most notably this happened because this was the product that they had in stock at that particular store i visited.
Its a neat product, but the whole idea of having a an EVDO solution like with the Sierra wireless card is the the ability to take it easily anywhere, the MB6000 is by design abit akward to drag around.

They do have more streamlined products on the abovementioned link, so feel free to browse around.

The C-Motech 650 will work easily on my macbook pro, its configured and works properly on my Macbook Pro, i was in Phuket Town and tested it, and i clocked speeds at about 100KBps download, there at the CAT telecom building.

At this point in time i am however in Ranong, and writing this through my Sierra 580 card.

Here is the link for some preliminary tests i did from my home.

One thing that made me abit worried about the C-Motech 650 card was that the staff at CAT telecom was quite eager to help me sell my old Sierra wireless 580 card to someone else, seemed they know many people that wanted their hands on that card.

Basically it tells me that the Sierra wireless card is better.
But thats just a conclusion now without much real world experience from testing both.

Both the products supports the revision 0 of the EVDO technology.

The cards that will support rev A of the EVDO technology is still uncertain, at least when it comes to the availability through CAT telecom, even if your card supports revision A, it still means that the infrastructure around you needs to support revision A.

Another thing, i was just at the CAT telecom office, and asked about the availability of the CCU-680 from C-motech, i was informed that it would not happen anytime soon, they still had alot of CCU-650 in stock, and no urgent need to provide anymore cards unless their stock ran out.

CCU-680 is the card you need in order to support revision A of the EVDO standard.

But as some profesionalls might have noticed, wireless communications at this level is abit immature, the different vendors still in some cases here and there have their own little dirty tricks that makes some vendors equipment work better with other vendors equipment, this is true for most wireless communications, and i do not believe that EVDO is much different in this respect.

When you are looking for antenna or amplifiers for these products, the important information i can give you is that you need antenna or other equipment that will have been produced for operation in the 800MHz band.