Slashdot Mirror
Life on the Road with 3G
david_adams writes "Since I first evaluated Sprint's new Vision "3G" high speed wireless data service in September of last year, I've had the opportunity to travel around the country, using the service to keep in touch with the world, receive all my spam, er, email, and do my work. I've used the service in hotels, restaurants, parked cars, moving cars, picnic tables, and airports, in huge cities, and in desolate stretches of interstate highway. Here are my impressions after this long term test."
...Can you hear me now?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
From talking to people I know in europe, the reason SMS is so popular is that SMS messages cost a ton less than talking on the phone. I don't belive "continent wide free long distance" exists over there. Some places still charge by the min for land -line phone calls.
The author seems puzzled by the popularity of SMS in Europe, but it's just simple economics. With most plans I've come across in England in France, it's cheaper to send an SMS than to make a 1-minute call. Rates overall are also more expensive, so getting in the habit of sending an SMS rather than making a call lowers your bills.
The other advantage is that in noisy environments like buses, subways, crowded hallways, etc. you don't have to shout over the crowd to get the message across. This keeps your neighbors from strangling you and lets you say your message once rather than repeating it 3 times.
Have you seen my stapler?
Well he says that he can get 12-18Kb/s per second on GPRS. Well thats not bad but here in the UK its just not worth doing. We are billed on a per Kb cost. To download a 1MB can pay upto US$8. Also the latency sucks so SSH over GPRS isn't the most friendly expierence in the world.
However we have just had Three lauch which should provide real 3G services. Now that should be cool. I can't wait to have to make sure my hair is neat when I answer a video call
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
First off, he's not talking about 3G. Not even close. If the Slashdot posting had said 2.5G, I'd have ignored it. I mean, I've been using GPRS in Boston on T-Mobile's network for over two years, and it's nothing to write about. He can't even read his email on his phone! Bah. I was using Outlook on my iPaq using a bluetooth connection to my GPRS enabled Nokia 6330i almost a year ago.
A little research would have showed that Sony Ericsson will be releasing the t608 for Sprint which is Bluetooth enabled. The t608 is perhaps the big brother of the t68i.
2 8
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?id=2
Also, using a phone connected to a computer via a data cable is a violation of the Sprint Terms of Service. If you do it enough they will charge you. The Unlimited Vision plans are intended to be used via handset and not cables. Sprint has the wireless internet cards for a reason and if you use these cards you get fast speed compared to the data cable method. Right now Sprint is assumably letting data cable internet usage slide because not a lot of people do it, but if it becomes popular they will start cracking down and many people will see lots of charges on their bill from it.
You've been warned.
As the article notes, it is really 2.5G service. Nevertheless, I think the author's experience mirrors mine in a lot of ways.
1. SMS is way overrated. It has its place, but given the tariffs in the US, it will never be a big deal. Calling is just too cheap.
2. Data interfaces suck on phones. Everyone keeps predicting the demise of PDAs, but my Handspring Visor Neo with the Sprint PCS module (available for $20) kills any "phone" out there. Go to a bigger (compared to a phone) Treo (for an arm and a leg), and the web is usable.
3. Phones need a better way to get data in and out. At a minimum, maybe a USB cable to synch data from a desktop/laptop. Again, my Visor/PCS phone rules here. I can't believe the Samsung phone inthe review wastes all the features by lacking that simple item. I hadn't considered "how the features work" when I looked at that phone a few months ago -- gotta add that criteria to my list. I do not want to enter several hundred addresses on a fricking phone keypad.
4. What I want in a phone/pda/service plan are the following:
a. desktop synch
b. a decent, usable screen/browser
c. a smallish form factor (less than my currrent clunky rig, but super-duper small isn't a big deal to me)
d. palm-like features (handwriting recognition, scheduler, phonebook, to-do list)
e. lots of third party developers and apps
f. total cost $100
g. good coverage (very important)
h. 1 meg/day of transfer for data
i. under $50/mo.
j. 250 primetime minutes, free weekends/nights
I have compromised on some of those things, but I still haven't found everything I want in my market. Video phones don't interest me. Ditto cameras and MP3 players. I want my phone and PDA to converge for basic web/mail/phone capabilities in one usable, comfortable package for a reasonable price.
Lots of petrified grits
3 options. The free, the limited, and the expensive-but-oso-cool option.
Free: Plug in the USB cable and make sure you have the necessary drivers and the phone set to the right setting. Typically, you're limited to 14.4k but it only uses normal airtime with NO extra charges.
Limited: You can pick a plan with either limited airtime for data or limited usage (like 40mb a month for example).
Expensive but oso cool: $99.99 a month gets you unlimited, any time of day, bandwidth at constant ~140kbps at peak time and ~170-180+kbps at offpeak hours. I've heard great things about this if you plan on using this a lot.
You'll need a phone capable of doing this. Most newer phones support it. Check Ebay for a USB cable. It shouldn't cost you more than $11 especially if you check eforcity.com
For example, my Motorola T720 is recognized as a usb modem when I plug it into my computer. Since I don't pay for any of the plans I mentioned above, I get 14.4. Still good for checking email or browsing low-graphic sites.
The official info about this kind of stuff can be found here at Verizon.
For my uses, 3G is overpriced and overrated. OK - the transfer rates are pretty good (especially compared to GSM or 2.5G), but the latencies still suck making it unpleasant for remote administration.
From the point of view of people who want to have fun (play games), 3G sucks because of the latency.
There have been a few cool uses of 3G so it's not all lost - I live in the Isle of Man, and Manx Telecom's mobile arm (Pronto) are doing 3G trials. One use is a bus full of computers they drive around to various schools around the country. The bus is networked by a single 3G handset and according to the piece in the newspaper, has worked out pretty well as a mobile 'net cafe.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I've had the service since early November, and I will be a sad, sad little boy if they ever deactivate it or change the pricing structure unfavorably. I principally use it with my laptop, and it's absolutely magnificent.
I have the Sanyo 4900 phone, fwiw, and it shows up to Linux as a USB modem using the standard acm.o driver. I get a pretty high latency, about 350ms ping to my gateway, but the bandwidth is around 20K/s (that's kiloBYTES) when I'm in a strong service area, averages around 12 if I'm moving around. Coverage is good, albeit not perfect. I drove from Atlanta to St Louis with a ping going the whole time, and lost less than 10 packets. There are a few dead zones in the rural area south of St Louis where my parents live, but not many (and we haven't found ANY cell phones that work in those areas, T-Mobile and Cingular all die in the same places)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
After reading about the unlimited PCS vision for only $10 over my regular plan I decided to try it. I typically spend 3-4 hours a day commuting to my job, to help that time pass faster I have already developed various techniques for getting work down such as preloading various websites, email, and code that I'm working on. Although some of the tools I develop can be run on my laptop running windows, others cannot and I hoped to be able to expand the range of stuff I can work on in transit.
I ordered a new phone, the sanyo 4900, that supported all the typical in-phone features such as email, messaging, and web browsing. It also has a USB for connecting a laptop etc. Since I already had an existing sprint pcs service most of the rebates weren't available, so I ended up paying full price for the new phone.
When I first got the phone I tried out some of the in-phone "3G" features, such as the built in browser, but found it very slow and clumsy. I typically would wait 30-60 seconds every time I tried loading a new page. Trying to type a url in using the keypad is extremely painful, and it seems many webpages just won't render in any usable way on such a tiny screen. I already have two email addresses, so I haven't made any real effort to use the sprint email.
The main way I now use the vision service is by connecting via USB to my laptop. This gives me a real web browser, and makes it possible to connect to my work via VPN.
Like the article says the latency is very high. Typically in the range of 500mS. Also the jitter (the variability in the latency) is very high as well, I often get latencies that vary from 200mS up to 1.2 S! This latency is most noticable if you try to use a terminal connection to login to a remote machine. Trying to type anything with a latency that high is downright painful. I have learned to keep an buffer in my head of what I have typed because I typically won't see it echoed back for 2-3 seconds after I type. For web browsing the latency is noticable, but usable.
Obviously writing code with such high latency is painful, fortunately there is another way. Trying to run a filesystem such as NFS is not really doable under these conditions, but ftp works fine. I typically work by loading source via ftp, editing, saving it back, and then using a (extremely slow) terminal to compile and execute with output redirected to a log file. I then load the log file (again with ftp) debug, edit code and repeat. Fortunately vim has built in ftp support so I can just load a file by saying ftp://hostname/dirpath/filename and then from then on it gets treated as a regular file.
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