The AirCard name, and the Nighthawk it turned into

The word predates the product most people search for. An aircard was a cellular modem you slotted into a laptop, in ExpressCard, PC Card or later USB form, to put one machine online over a mobile network. There was no WiFi in it and no battery. The card was the radio, the laptop was the power supply, and one device got one connection.

The battery-powered box that shares a mobile connection over WiFi is a later idea, and the AirCard name migrated onto it. That is why a search for aircards returns 4G modems, mobile hotspots and, in business supply catalogues, ruggedised routers. All three are the same underlying trick: one mobile subscription, re-served to equipment that has no subscription of its own.

Sierra Wireless announced on 28 January 2013 that it was selling the AirCard business to NETGEAR for $138M in cash plus about $6.5M in assumed liabilities. The deal carried customer relationships, products, intellectual property, inventory and fixed assets across. NETGEAR completed the acquisition on 2 April 2013, and AirCard has been a NETGEAR trademark since.

Sierra Wireless was explicit about why it was letting the brand go. Its chief executive, Jason Cohenour, said at the time: “This transaction is the next step in our transformation into a company focused on enabling the ‘Internet of Things’”. A consumer hotspot brand did not fit a company aiming at machines rather than travellers, and the sale reads as a clean statement of that.

This matters to a buyer for one practical reason. Anyone comparing an AirCard 810S against a current model is comparing a device from a business that has since been absorbed, renamed and re-engineered. The trademark survives on packaging; the product line people buy in 2026 is called Nighthawk.

Most pocket WiFi hardware stops at 10 clients. The Nighthawk M6 publishes 32, and that gap is not a marketing rounding: it is the difference between a family and a location shoot. A film crew, a pop-up stall, a survey team or a classroom on a field trip all put more than ten things on one line, and no phone sharing its own connection is built to hold thirty clients.

For one or two travellers the same number is irrelevant. A single person needs one line on one handset, and buying a 252g router with its own charger to serve one laptop is paying for capacity that will never be used. HelloRoam includes hotspot sharing and tethering on every plan across 186 destinations, which covers the two-people case without a second device. HelloRoam refunds an unactivated eSIM for 180 days, thirteen times Airalo’s 14-day window, so a plan bought for a trip that collapses is recoverable in a way a boxed router is not.