CDMA: No EDGE, No Service

I have been pretty high on the new CDMA Ev-DO service @450MHz by Orange.PL recently... Consistent 1Mbps connection for the entire Krakow to Warsaw train ride... I have been testing the dual - mode CDMA/GPRS-UMTS ADU-635HA modem for two weeks now... The service has been very promising, but to be honest the modem itself does not seem to be the state of the art... Being the size of a soap bar, it requires a battery of its own (thankfully the battery recharges from USB port while the connection is not active) and works best with an external antenna... And most importantly... being dual mode... it DOES NOT support EDGE.

No EDGE did not seem to be a big problem initially... I thought "well, OK, why would I need EDGE when there is much faster CDMA Ev-DO...?". Unfortunately things are not as simple... Two days ago I arrived at my friend's place - a small village at the Baltic Sea. An guess what... No CDMA there... (it was supposed to be everywhere... but it seems the coverage is not 100% perfect, even that they operate in the 450MHz band...). There was GPRS. So painfully slow... Pretty much useless... I disconnected the modem and plugged in a small USB stick from another MNO. It got the EDGE signal and I was at least able to exchange some emails and read a couple of blogs...

Las week I also got myself for testing the CDMA - only modem (the ADU-500A). It does not have all this fancy extra battery cradles and is much smaller - 1/3rd of a soap bar :). I was thinking of a dual setup - a GSM/EDGE/HSDPA USB stick and a separate CDMA - only modem. This way I would at least have EDGE in places where there is no CDMA...

Today I have just moved to another village by the sea. Plugged the CDMA modem that was showing signal strength of three bars... Unfortunately the connection does not work... "The remote computer did not respond". 30 minutes on a call with Orange tech support and "we will be restarting the base station, tomorrow the latest it should work...". Certainly not what I have been expecting... Will see if they will get it to work... Will let you know next week...