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FROM THE IT FORUM

The IT Forum gives AGC members an opportunity to discuss best practices and garner feedback about products and services that increase efficiencies. The following questions and answers were taken from recent forum posts.

Q: Is anyone out there Tethering with Verizon?
Jim Gaba
Sierra Nevada Construction, Inc.

A: Yes, we have about 50 users with that capability.
Todd Eldredge MCSE, VCP, CCA
Donley's

A: Yes, we tether Blackberry curves as a low cost option to MIFI. Several disadvantages include single use only and not being able to talk on the phone while tethering. Advantages include low cost and the ability to enable/disable without a long term contract.
Scott Auge
Clark Construction Company

A: I can chime in here a bit. We did the Nextel to Verizon move a year ago. And here in New England the service/tower coverage was the driving force. When we had signal Nextel’s PTT technology cannot be beat – but many times there was no proper coverage. More than half of our other users don’t care for PTT so they did not miss Nextel at all for that feature. I have stayed away from tethering – few of us used it years ago with Blackberry phones, works in a pinch but dedicated USB modem, Mifi or new phones with hotspot feature are the way to go. I will occasionally share USB modems with a router – Cradlepoint 1200 works well these days. We are moving our 3G usb users in the next few months to Verizon’s new 4G USB modems – the pricing has gone down, the overages are reasonable and the speed is better by far and there are more and more areas where 4G actually works around Boston. We will move modems around where it makes sense – this has kept the cost reasonable.
Bruce L. Roberts
J.F. White Contracting Co.

A: I would consider greatly switching to one of the other smartphones – especially the Android phones as they eliminate a lot of the hassle of getting email on the Blackberry, automatically do real-time sync without a server based software and I believe the data plan is cheaper for than the Blackberry. The initial phone cost is probably a little more but it is such a better device. These new smart phones (except iPhone) are able to work as hot spots. I am in no way an expert but look into it heavily before doing anything else. It may costs a little more but I believe you get much more versatility in one device and like I have told people I think Blackberry users do not know what they are missing.
Jeff Crawford
Lionberger Construction

A: I’ll throw in my 2 cents for the Androids. Most of our users are currently on BlackBerrys, but we have a few power users testing out the Androids. With 2.3, Android has finally figured out how to sync with Exchange and the larger screen sizes have been a huge plus for reading email/plans/etc. On the data card side, I know we’re talking Verizon, but I wanted to put in a plug for the Sprint Overdrives. We switched from AT&T air cards to Sprint Overdrive WiFi hotspots about 9 months ago. Overall it’s been a huge improvement over AT&T. Sprint’s 3G network actually has much greater coverage than AT&T’s, though AT&T has better non-3G coverage for voice calls. The Overdrives can connect up to 5 devices at any one time, including wireless printers. Another bonus with Sprint, is that the plans offer 4G unlimited usage (3G is limited to 5GB/month). Put one in a trailer with a wireless printer and you have an instant network for 4 computers and no software to install on any of the computers. Through in some WiFi iPads and you have a cheap instant network that anyone can figure out.
Jeremy Hicks
Goettle Engineering and Construction

A: Beware converting over to Droid until you test the ActiveSync Calendaring thoroughly. We have several Droid/iPhone users that have missing Appointments/Contacts that have disappeared without warning or error message. I just left a roundtable conference with a group called NOREX that confirmed that I was not the only one experiencing this. In my mind, Blackberry still excels at phone/email/contacts/calendar. No one beats them at that.
Greg Smolens
Sunland Asphalt