Not in the US as not living in the US isn't the same as not being on the US market, i.e. having products certified for use on the US market and buying customers on the US market. Product names and involved customer names are not always possible to discuss on public forums, but in a global world, many customers operates out of quite a number of countries with fixed and/or mobile installations. The reason I said I'm lucky I don't have to spend time with the approvals is that I know about all the time a collegue do spend on phone and with emails and constatly producing different, more or less funny documents, to get approvals for just about world-wide coverage. As Andy already noted, the module manufacturer can often help getting a module certified by the US operators in question, but then the type of product and what it is used for will decide what further approvals that will be needed.

With enough installed equipment, you will start to see problems such as base stations that have working voice function but where for example GPRS isn't routing traffic, or cells that are doing their darndest to roam all visitors to neighbour cells. With good contacts with the correct people at the operator, it may take minutes to get them to pick up the cell ID and have them restart the relevant cell or look at possibly incorrect configurations. Without the right phone number to call, it can take quite some time to get them to accept such an error report and actually solve the problem. With moving installations, this may represent a white area on the map until the problem is solved. With fixed installations, this can be very troublesome since the customer sees non-working equipment and normally don't care if the problem is caused by the operator or your equipment. Sometimes you can rechannel some of their anger by asking them to try to use their mobile phone or a computer modem and surf from the same location - when they get the same problems with their PC, you may not have to take the full anger.

Using special M2M subscriptions can also help in getting better contacts with the operator since they have to be involved in the first place for the activation of the firewalled routing solutions to set up the virtual networks. The technicians involved in this will represent good entry points to reach the relevant technical staff at the operator.

When you are really in luck, you can manage to totally reverse the situation, i.e. you may even get the operator to start discussing the possibility that the spin-off supervision statistics from your products may be used to report back availability problems in the networks since they represent a valuable and dense online-supervised measurement grid.

In a number of countries, the operators are very interested in getting help to quickly catch technical problems. I don't know how many units you would have to sell in US until you might get similar requests or at least direct contact numbers to the technical staff supervising the network cells, but as mentioned, I have seen companies quite high on the fortune-500 list have problems to get any technical contact at all.

PCMCIA modules may be good to use if a PC is involved, but I would think most operators would already have moved forward to external USB dongles now. However, real embedded modules are normally to prefer for embedded equipiment running 24x7 - especially if there is also a need to fulfll some of the automotive regulations/requirements. Big problems here may be the temperature range or vibration/shock tests. The original PCMCIA standard for 16-bit devices is also quite quickly dying. It was quite a number of years since much products started to migrate to the CardBus standard. And with PCI-E, the technological race continues. Products aimed for a PC may not have the life span required for embedded use. It isn't too fun to design a product around a specific modem and find out that after you have all your approvals (including possibly end-customer acceptance), you suddenly find that the modem is quickly reaching end-of-life status.