The Current Limits of Verizon EVDO (long)
- From: Bob Giddings <bobg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:42:22 -0500
I believe the old Rhinestone Cowboy himself said it best. Feel
free to sing along, folks:
"There's been a load of compromisin'
On the road to my Verizon...""
As some of you may know, Verizon recently got tired of getting
beat like a red-headed stepchild by Sprint, and rolled out their
Sooper-Dooper Rev A version of EVDO. It is universally
available, wherever EVDO is available. There are no REV A
phones, however. You have to buy an appropriate Aircard to get
it. These come in various flavors, according to the ports
available in your computer: PCMCIA, USB, and Expresscard. There
are no differences between them in effective speed. The only
advantage being touted between them is for the USB modem, which
comes with a Y cable with two USB plugs on the computer side. You
don't have to use both, but if you do it effectively doubles the
power input to the modem (and drain on your laptop battery) ,
which "may improve reception in fringe areas".
I could get no definitive answer as to whether this makes the USB
actually twice as powerful as the other flavors, such as the
Expresscard.
Anal Engineers, start your search engines!
Meanwhile, last week, as the last ergs faded whimpering from my 5
year old Kyocera 2325's battery, I finally went down and had it
put to sleep. Then I signed up for a "free" LG vx8300 EVDO phone
with a two year plan, tethered it by USB cable to my laptop, and
saw a substantial improvement over National Access, Verizon's
previous lame network. As I remember, National Access gave me
speeds of 65 kbps up and perhaps 150 kbps down. EVDO doubles the
upload speed, and I have experienced local download speeds from
225 to 1120 kbps, depending.
Depending on what, you ask?
That's rather mysterious, but seems to be a combination of signal
strength and the density of use in your particular area. In
particular, density of use seems a likely explanation for the
wide range of throughput available from minute to minute in any
one particular spot.
How did I get to be such a confident expert, anywho?
Well, this afternoon, after a sushi-and-saki lunch with my newly
employed stepson, I put on my best Tony Soprano manner, went down
to the Verizon store, scattered sales droids in all directions,
and forced them to cough up their head wireless guru and
panjandrum from the tiny windowless room in the back where they
keep him. Then I squeezed him till his little red eyes bulged
out.
Here's what I managed to extract:
1. Verizon has a 2 meg pipe devoted to EVDO. You will never get
more no matter what you do with your phone. In bursts, if the
fates allow and all the stars align, you may approach that figure
on download with either Rev A or the regular Rev O equipment. And
you may win the lottery.
By contrast, Cable Broadband routinely delivers 4 or 5 megs.
2. Rev A's principal improvement is in uploading. They had a
laptop with a Rev A Expresscard modem set up in the store, and
allowed me to do various web based tests which showed upload
speeds in the 500 kbps range. My tethered Rev 0 phone in the
parking lot was getting 150.
If all you do is text newsgroups, email - with maybe a couple of
pictures attached - or surf the web, you will never notice the
difference in speed while uploading. That activity is almost all
downloading. If you routinely send out tons of video, music,
pirated software, or hundreds of photos, there's a triple speed
advantage on the upside to Rev A.
3. Then there's the downside. I tested the downloading speed of
the Rev A laptop in the store using the following meters:
http://www.speedtest.net/
http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Then I went out in the parking lot and tested my Rev 0 tethered
phone downloading with the same meters.
Here's the results in Kpbs:
Meter Rev A, in store Rev 0 phone
Speedtest 1059 865
Cnet 623 593
Speakeasy 894 922
Make what you will of that. To me it seems that there is little
difference, and what difference there is may be influenced by
something other than whether it's Rev A or Rev 0. Like maybe how
much traffic there is from minute to minute.
4. The big advantage of using a tethered phone is that broadband
is then a service you can turn off and on at will. Like when you
travel, and when you come home.
With the Aircards, you are buying little flat phone and a calling
plan. After two years, you can turn them off at will all right,
with no penalty. But if you want to turn them off again, you
have to sign a new contract.
Two years is a long time with this technology. In two years, we
may all be using $79 Iphones. Or maybe not.
Finally, I leave you with another conundrum. I have a Wilson
Trucker external antenna installed in the trailer. I also have
another portable external Rangestar antenna I can throw up on the
dash. I did a little test at home on Cnet's speed page, and got
the following downloading results:
Without external antenna With Wilson With Rangestar
435 kbps 220 285
What the hell? External antennas actually DECREASE speed? I
don't know what to make of that, other than to disconnect the
external antenna. I can see how there would be little difference
in a strong signal area. But a DECREASE?
I did the test twice with similar results. I get an extra bar on
the phone with the external antennas, but that does not show up
on the laptop with VZAccess. Dunno what that means either.
Bob, happy enough for now with his tethered phone
http://www.arcatapet.net/bobgiddings
.
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