Above and beyond SF to NYC, I have done Istanbul to London, Pittsburgh to Miami and several shorter road trips eg Pittsburgh to Kansas City. My next trip would be from SF to Ft.Lauderdale. I agree road trips are for swing trading and not day trading.
I would recommend: Verizon Jetpack⢠4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi® 4510L Prepaid No contracts. Data is relatively expensive though. $90 = 10GB for one month, $60 = 3GB for one month, $15 = 250MB for one week. I dropped my AT&T DSL backup in favor of the Verizon Jetpack Mifi and it has performed well at home and everywhere I've taken it.
Yeah, I'll be swing trading fairly liquid ETFs so temporary loss of connectivity won't be a major issue. I already have 4G access with tethering on my rooted phone with Virgin Mobile (which uses Sprint's network) and the coverage has not been great outside of urban areas (although it currently suffices for my day-to-day use.) Seems getting a Mifi plan from Verizon is the way to go for this.
AT&T has been great for me. Has worked great for me out in vegas area and around lake mead. Check the coverage along the roads you will be on here. You can zoom in pretty detailed. http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/#?type=data
No, wireless hotspot from iPhone. No cords. Clearly, I wasn't staring at the screen the entire time, but when I did, I was never off line. surf
AT&T is the only way to go.... I travel a lot and spent some time driving in places where gas stops are 100 miles apart. AT&T is the only service provider that works almost everywhere and that includes good coverage in the Caribbean and Rocky Mountains. The connection may not always be the best but it is there compared to other services.
I use the Verizon Jetpack⢠4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi® 4510L Prepaid as well. Seemed to have dropped signal at times with ATT. And sure is much cheaper than Satelite phone from few years back.
The OPer may want to consider a remote desktop/server or VPS to run his trading software then connect remotely using Remote Desktop. This would be a better solution if your trading software doesn't deal with random disconnects too well. You could even connect to your home broadband if you 1) setup a dynamic dns service for your dynamic IP, and 2) the total lag between your remote connection and the connection to your broker is not too great.