Skip to Content
Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual
book

Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

by David Pogue
October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
928 pages
34h 56m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Cellular Modems

WiFi hot spots are fast and usually cheap—but they’re hot spots. Beyond 150 feet away, you’re offline.

No wonder laptop luggers across America are getting into cellular Internet services. All the big cellphone companies offer USB sticks that let your laptop get online at high speed anywhere in major cities. No hunting for a coffee shop; with a cellular Internet service, you can check your email while zooming down the road in a taxi. (Outside the metropolitan areas, you can still get online wirelessly, though much more slowly.) Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T all offer cellular Internet networks with speeds approaching a cable modem’s. So why isn’t the world beating a path to this delicious technology’s door? Because it’s expensive—$60 a month on top of your phone bill.

In System Preferences→Network, click your cellular modem’s icon (below). Click Connect to get online—or, better yet, turn on “Show WWAN status in menu bar.” (It stands for wireless wide-area network, if that helps.) Next time, you’ll be able to connect by choosing Connect from this menulet (above) instead of lumbering off to System Preferences.

Figure 17-6. In System Preferences→Network, click your cellular modem’s icon (below). Click Connect to get online—or, better yet, turn on “Show WWAN status in menu bar.” (It stands for wireless wide-area network, if that helps.) Next time, you’ll be able to connect by choosing Connect from this menulet (above) instead of lumbering off to System Preferences.

To get online, insert the USB stick; it may take about 15 seconds for the thing to latch onto the cellular signal.

Now you’re supposed to make the Internet connection using the special “dialing” software provided by the cellphone company. Technically, though, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chuck Toporek, Chris Stone, Jason McIntosh

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449314828Errata Page