Seeing as hot-spots, café-, hotel- and airport Wi-Fi can be flaky at best, unsecured at worst, and often a hassle in between, the next best thing to bringing your broadband LAN line on the road is a Kyocera Passport KPC650 PC Card.

Available through Telus, the Passport jacks directly into your PC - or into a Kyocera KR1 Mobile Router - where it does broadband internet through Telus' high speed EVDO network in major urban centers across Canada with speeds of 400-700 kbps, (nationwide and rural coverage through the 1X network with speeds of 40-60 kbps). That's not the screaming fast internet you can find in a hard-wired land line, but ten times better than dial up, which is respectably fast for most applications. Not to mention the whole wireless freedom thing.

Costing some C$250 by itself, $150 with a 2 year rate plan or a scant $30 with a 3-year commitment, you'll also need to subscribe to a service to use the KPC650, obviously. Rate plans range from $5 - $375 per month plus usage fees, which correspondingly range from $15 per MB down to $0 in the big rate plan, which includes 1024 MB of data, an additional $1 per MB if you use more than that. Thereafter, you've got a wireless broadband connection capable of data speeds of up to 2.4 Mbps that's always with you - your own personal hotspot in your pocket - and is probably more than enough to be your primary home connection, too -- if you're all business, anyway.

Gamers in multiplayer sessions may have some latency issues (high or erratic ping), which is often remedied simply by adjusting the Passport's swiveling antenna; other times, you're just out of range and out of luck, which is an inconsistency most gamers will want to avoid.