Hello,

Here is the situation that has developed in the past few weeks. Let me
start with a little background.

I work IT in a police department. Every investigator has their own
laptop, and there are a couple air cards (novatel s720) that they
share between them. I believe it was the beginning of the second week
of april that it was reported to me that the air cards did not
work...on ANY of the laptops. All laptops had been working the
previous week with the air cards.

So...after a little bit of troubleshooting and a wasted hour on the
phone with sprint tech support, heres what i have.

-Downloaded the latest version of the connection manager off
sprint.com/downloads, which also updated the firmware for the card.
connection manager version - 3.08.029
Firmware version - 135
-I click connect on connection manager and everything functions as
normal;Shows connected, gives me "welcome to the sprint pcs network",
and even shows some traffic (mostly sent traffic from trying to
connect to websites, but also gets .17kb of received, and stops
there).
-This is NOT a browser issue! Sprint could not seem to understand
that, but I am unable to ping any websites (eg: sprint.com, yahoo.com,
etc) from a command prompt.
-Firewall on or off, same result.
-All computers are running windows XP SP2.

It should also be noted that I tried it on another slightly older
laptop (i believe it may be running win2k, but i'm not sure). This
laptop works just fine, HOWEVER, IT IS NOT CONNECTED TO THE NETWORK AT
ANY TIME! This leads me to believe that microsoft released an update
somewhere along the way that is preventing my aircards from working.
But why do they show connected? I'm completely baffled. And if that
were the case, I would hope to god sprint would have an idea.

Has anyone ever seen this before? I've tried uninstalling,
reinstalling, both old and new versions...no luck.

Any tips, tricks, solutions or help would be much appreciated. sorry
for the lengthy description but I wanted to get all the details out
the first time.

-BP