Filed under: Wireless, iTunes, Reviews
EVDO Day 2: The Morning Commute Test
I'm nearing 24 hours with EVDO, and, so far, I really like it. Above in the pic accompanying this post, you can see my connection stats to date. Yesterday, while at work, I maintained a 5 hour and twenty-two minute connection that was very nice, solid and fast. The 13 minute connection after that was during the commute on the train home. The connection was pretty good during this commute, but I did notice a few times where web pages loaded slower than normal and where IM messages came through rapid-fire in bullets after several seconds of silence from the other person chatting. Then last night, at home, I was connected for an hour and 35 minutes, before I stopped and switched back over to my cable network at home. Then, this morning, I reconnected at home for about an hour and a half. The connection speeds in my apartment weren't nearly as fast as they had been at work yesterday, and depending upon the room I was in, they were really not too great at all. However, I didn't lose connection at all.
This morning, I had to drive up to 10591 from 10708 (zip codes), so I setup my trusty 15-inch PowerBook (whom I named Kurosawa, btw) in the passenger seat, launched iTunes and started streaming Internet radio at 128kbps to see how the connection held up. For the first half of the ride everything was clear with no re-buffering of the stream, but once I was about half-way to work, it started re-buffering every 15-20 seconds for a total of 37 interruptions of the stream during the trip. Still, it never disconnected during this whole trip, which surprised me, as regular cellular connection can be pretty spotty in that drive up the Sprain River Parkway. Pretty cool. I'm still impressed. The next test? World of Warcraft. Stay tuned...
UPDATE: Here's today's stats from a weak signal in a very old, thick-walled building at a different location than yesterday. Not as good as yesterday, but still better than dial-up or GPRS via the bluetooth connection with my Razr.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian said 12:23PM on 10-04-2005
Thanks for being thorough on this review so far.
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EVDO Guy said 12:31PM on 10-04-2005
Glad the tests are going well! One thing to remember. There are 2 networks available, BroadbandAccess (400K - 700K download speed) and NationalAccess (50K - 100K download speed). If you are in a NationalAccess area, you would get a ton of re-buffering of iTunes @ 128K (probably wouldn't work well). You can see a fairly current EVDO (=BroadbandAccess) NY Map at:
http://www.evdoinfo.com/Verizon_BroadbandAccess_Maps/EVDO_Coverage/New_York_EVDO_-_Verizon_BroadbandAccess_20050628441/
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Jay Contonio said 12:53PM on 10-04-2005
So would you switch from having a cable modem at home (say you aren't there that much) and just going to this for use everywhere? I'd dig this because I can't get my laptop on my corporate network, but it would be nice to have it online while I'm here.
I use my lappy at a coffee shop with wifi mostly...but I wouldn't mind going to different places.
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Thorn said 1:27PM on 10-04-2005
The last I checked, it was against the Terms of Service to stream anything using VZW's BroadBand or NationalAccess service, which is why I'd never use it to replace my home broadband. :(
Obviously, streaming works -- it's not like they're port-blocking or anything, ... I just think it sucks that VZW is making it clear that they don't intend for this to be an always-on wired broadband replacement.
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EVDO Guy said 5:32PM on 10-04-2005
Based on your graph/benchmarks, that indicates that you were in a 1xRTT (or NationalAccess) area. In those areas, you will still get 2X dial up, but you will see in the 50K - 100K speeds (which is what you saw). For a description of "What is EVDO" and 1XRTT, see the following page:
http://www.evdoinfo.com/EVDO/Info/What_is_EVDO?_2005021237/
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John said 6:00PM on 10-04-2005
Verizon is still evil.
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iFelix said 3:16AM on 10-05-2005
"I just think it sucks that VZW is making it clear that they don't intend for this to be an always-on wired broadband replacement."
Interestingly in the UK, Vodafone are *thinking* about marketing their 3G (EVDO) service as a home broadband replacement.
I was phoned by Vodafone and asked that very question.
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