Mobile broadband, at $60 a month, has become an addiction and a lifeline. I've found the most important factor in connectivity in fringe areas isn't the carrier or the brand of cellular broadband card (see The Best Cellular Broadband Devices but the antenna. And nothing beats a good antenna inside a laptop.

At our family camp in New York State's Adirondack Mountains, the view from my writing desk is grand (photo above), but the nearest cell tower is a couple miles away. With a couple Verizon aircards I've used, both PC Card and USB, I get half a bar of cellular strength, one bar on a nearby hill. The same goes for my handheld cellphones: barely enough signal to make a call. When I switched to a notebook PC with an integrated cellular modem and an antenna in the lid--this one's a Lenovo ThinkPad X300--my signal strength shot up to two bars, sometimes three.

With an internal antenna, I could maintain a connection for at least half an hour, sometimes hours on end. Two bars doesn't sound impressive when you're in town, but out in the sticks, that's outstanding. Especially when the fallback option is a dial-up modem connection on a line so noisy the best throughput is 14.4 Kbps. Even if you don't have a vacation place on the very fringe of cellular coverage, you'll find an integrated laptop cellular antenna to be a godsend, whether you're trying to make a connection deep inside a building, sitting on the tarmac waiting for the last of the passengers to board, or cruising the interstates.

My tests were informal, but in working with other brands of laptops such as Dell, I've found a similar pattern: If the antenna is integrated into the laptop, you've got a much better chance of connecting and staying connected.

Footnote: Cellular coverage is improving in some scenic rural areas not out of the goodness of Verizon's heart or the prospects of making a bundle off cellular calling minutes in the middle of nowhere, but because search-and-rescue teams sometimes prefer cellular to (or in addition to) two-way radios and state agencies are pressuring for (or underwriting) cell sites. Plus, the better the cell coverage, the farther unprepared idiots can go into the woods and stilll call for help.