Following the merger of Cingular Wireless and the former AT&T Wireless networks in 2006, Cingular wireless broadband services are now available in most major markets in America; and apparently their broadband products/service offerings have also been expanded.

Cingular Wireless (a joint venture between AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corporation -which is sometimes called Singular Wireless as well) is one of the largest wireless service providers in the United States, serving well over 50 million customers. What is not so known about Cingular's wirless product offering is that they have one of largest digital voice and data network in the nation. Its third generation (3G) wireless technology based network uses HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology to service its voice and data-services clients.

Traditionally, Cingular wireless broadband services have been a well-established brand in consumer wireless (cellular) voice and data products. However, Cigular also offers (through its parent companies AT&T and Bell South) a range of broadband data solutions that you can possibly use for your primary/backup uplink to the Internet, or simply to provide a multi-homed (redundant) route to the Internet.

Considering that Cingular broadband mobile products are based on HSDPA (which is the high-speed evolution of GSM/EDGE --a common core network that provides interoperability to billions of mobile users in more than 210 countries), --Cingular is not only well-positioned to offer fixed broadband links to your business locations, but also a host of enterprise-class mobile data solutions through their EDGE (high speed wireless data network) network that spans over almost every major market in America.

Mobile data connection speeds between 400-700Kbps (kilobits per second) on the downlink and bursts to more than a megabit per second are supported by most Cingular Broadband solutions.

It must be noted, however, that while Cingular's laptop modem cards are based on dual-band HSDPA/UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone System) (850/1900Mhz), they are backward compatible with EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) in four bands (850/900/1800/1900Mhz).

Here is an interesting way to (possibly) use Cingular Wireless Broadband as a backup uplink to the Internet: While Cingular's BroadbandConnect products are designed for use with a laptop modem card; it may be (technically) possible to use that connection as an emergency datalink-backup by aggregating traffic from your local WLAN clients, and routing it through your Cigular wireless uplink to the Internet. Of course, for this to work, you need to bridge your traffic from your wifi WLAN through your LAN over to your laptop configured to aggregate this traffic; and then uplink it to the Internet through your Cingular wireless broadband Internet connection. This is not a setup that we would recommend, but if your uplink to the Internet is down, and you are completely cut off from the Internet, this may be your (temporary) light at the end of the tunnel. Setup can get a bit tricky, but it's doable –technically at least. Of course, you should carefully review the Terms of Service, and make sure your are in compliance with the same. In any case, while this kind of setup would be not suitable for your day to day operations, it may come handy during an emergency -i.e. in case of your primary broadband uplink going down and you finding yourself stuck on Gilligan's Island without any access to the Internet. Considering that most broadband wireless feeds to the Internet are now multi-homed with several layers of redundancy, however, you would probably never have a need to try something like the aforementioned (rather intriguing) setup that someone had reported to us not too long ago.

You may want to check out some of the broadband Internet Access products from Cingular to see if they would be suitable (from data transfer rates, and cost point of view) for being used as a backup uplink to the Internet. They offer custom wireless broadband solutions for Internet access suitable not only for textual data (email, web content, etc.) but also for transmitting full motion video and audio -applications that require reliable connectivity meeting high end QoS standards.