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Review Of Verizon's New Wireless Network
jagger writes "The service gives you the speed of broadband, the ease of WiFi and the coverage of cellular... sort of. The service is currently rolled out in Washington D.C. and San Diego, CA but offers speeds comparable to broadband. Read the full review from Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post at Yahoo News."
boradband?
Sounds too much like a Ginsu..."It slices, it dices, it can even cut a steel can! Call now, operators are standing by!" Personally I'm a bit suspicious of products that claim to do everything, they invariably do at least half the stuff they claim but are good at none of it.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
I must see if we have this boradband in the UK - how does it compare to broadband?
fortune -o
The biggest blocking factor for me on Verizon is the lack of bluetooth phones. My t610 joined with my Powerbook is a shear joy (except for the speed). Bluetooth is great. Verizon sucks for not having any handsets that use it (or pressuring manufactures to make a decent CDMA phone with bluetooth).
We are starting to deploy the cards on sales laptops. While most of our sales guys are out of the highest speed markets noted in the article, the card and software have worked very well and both are an absolute cinch to install and use.
I have to give some credit to Verizon for really putting their competitors to shame. I pay $30 a month for DSL thats 1024/256 Mb/s I get excellent customer service. I had been an earthlink customer prior to this for over 5 years and got tired of there ever creeping up prices. My only concern here is it seems this is basically WiFi via there current cell phone network. if so then again we are going to run into the local bells muscling the market.
A year after I move to Florida they deploy this... Oh well, guess I'll just enjoy Daytona Beach.
can you IM me now? good....
I can see this as being a promising service.. as of now Verizon Wireless has the largest nation-wide network and one of the best coverages in the nation..
I remember that stuff. It usually came in a 56k variety ... So much wasted time.
BE DEAD CAREFUL OF VERIZON's WIFI SERVICE
This is for your New Yorkers who know what I'm talking about. (wifi service in the island of Manhattan free for all verizon dsl/dialup users)
What is to be careful of? Fake Verizon-WIFI APs. No joke. I was walking down 14th street next to Broadway, and suddenly I wanted to hop online to check what the weather would be for later that day.
I pop out my Zaurus, pop in my wifi card, and start sniffing for whatever wireless networks I can get to. I hit a Verizon-WIFI AP, which works for me being that my company is a customer of theirs. I pop in my Verizon Online password, and my password, hit enter, and I'm in.
Except for ONE problem. I typed in my username wrong! (Zaurus 5600 owners know how much of a bitch it is to type numbers with the damn Fn key.) But I still got in!!! I reconnected, typed in a bogus user/pass, and still had zero issues getting in.
At first I didn't realize what was going on (being that I was late for class, and rushing like crazy). But then it dawned on me, that this was a fake AP setup to steal real verizon user-names and passwords. Pretty slick if you ask me.
Yeah yeah, not too related to the topic at hand, but other verizon customers may want to know
Sunny Dubey
"...it includes neither an e-mail account nor voice phone service."
But it does sustain rates around 500 kbps or over...
Voice over IP, anyone? It seems like they're practically begging that application- why carry and pay for a cell phone too, especially if you can get this service on a PDA some day?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Sadly, it also gives you the quality of Verizon.
now i can download my mp3's and screener iso's while leading the RIAA and MPAA's lawyers on a high speed chase!
:P :P
you cant sue me until you catch me and serve me with a summons
nyah nyah now im in mexico
Verizon says BroadbandAccess's downloads should average 3oo to 500 kilobits per second (kbps) and can hit 2 million bits per second (Mbps) at best.
...and I thought slashdot editors were bad! I get 3oo kilobits per second myself though.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
I currently pay 40$ a month and use the Audiovox 5220 card that Verizon is selling.
Thing is, this is not a new service and I'm not getting it from Verizon. I'm getting it from Monet Mobile.
...but not for long...
The service is fantastic- I can't imagine a better product. The truly sad thing is that Monet Mobile (www.monetmobile.com) is going bankrupt and shutting me down on April 1, at which point I'm going to have to pay the Verizon fees or go back to wired internet... (sigh)
Lets see.. I pay $50 / month for DSL. I also have to pay for a $20 / month "basic phone" line just to get the DSL. By basic, it's just a dial tone, no caller id, no features, even the ringer stays turned off so I dont have to deal with telemarketers. I could care less about it. I get free long distance, 400 anytime minutes, free nights and weekends, and free mobile-to-mobile minutes on my wireless phone. Plus voice mail, caller ID and I can take it anywhere. So why do I need a wired phone? Just so Bellsouth can establish DSL service. Yuck! It stands as an emergency 911 phone in case the wireless phone's battery is dead (if ever..).
That means I already pay $70 / month just to get DSL. I already have Verizon Wireless, so I might qualify for some kind of package deal discount.
The wireless phone I have is already a data-capable G3 phone. Possibly just a flash upgrade will enable the higher rates. So, I am probably out just a USB cable to get online. Anywhere, whenever. Hmmm.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
You know, it seems that where the telco's dropped the ball with fiber-to-the-curb, the wireless providers stand to prosper using RF.
The article didn't go in depth (or mention at all) about security the wireless service uses. If this is something that is widespread, I only hope that the security is something to be applauded. I would hate for a user in the home to go to their bank and enter their information only for the ever lurking hacker/cracker to gain access to their information.
Does anybody know of the security protocals used for this?
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
What's the latency like on this network? It's typically a problem with wireless that they have slow response times. The article covers the bandwidth problem but does not tell us anything about this. Inquiring gamer wants to know.
Michael
..up here in Ontario, Rogers cable offers boredband, where you click on links just like usual, then get bored waiting for pr0n on their so called "high speed network". It fucking rocks.
Only one question remains:
Is it 6,000 times faster than DSL?
(sorry, but someone had to say it)
Is it on teh spoke?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
Imagine John Kerry using a whack!
That kind of speed, that good of coverage and that low of a price.. Hmm.. I gotta see it to believe it.
and I wrote a story about this months ago. Here's what you Linux geeks won't like. So far it won't work in Linux. That's mainly a driver issue with the card or really that there is no Linux driver (that I am aware of). Also I think that it is installed (even in Windows) in a funny way. It has to connect under dial-up networking?!?!
I was troubleshooting a problem that my client was having today, so I traced his IP and found a misconfigured (jacked) router on the "myvzw" network. The thing was routing packets to itself, preventing anything from sending data to him........ "Can you get packets now?"
"But at $79.99 a month, it's only a good deal to those who can write it off as a business expense."
Grrr. I'm paying $60 for a (highly rate limited due to the # of subscribers) 256Kbps 802.11 uplink, $99 for 128Kbps IDSL (yeah, I know it's just repackaged ISDN) because the former is too unreliable, and $15 for a decent dial-up to backup all the others because I can not afford not to have a connection! If I thought it would help I would kill someone to get 600Kbps for $80.
You can not function in the modern employment world above the level of "service" without solid, fast Internet connections. If you haven't figured this out yet you're grist for the unemployment line. It's a personal expense the same way a plumber pays for a toolbox full of tools. Get it?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
True?
Do they have like 10,000 APs everywhere or do they have high power units? Whos AP's are they using? How does this interfeer with others 802.11b?
I just got wireless broadband out here in rural West Virginia. Amazing..I know. It is great as I get 1.3Mb down about the same up for $50 a month. Anyhow I just bought a wireless router and it seems to interfere with my wireless broadband antenna. When I enable the wireless functionality on the router my internet connect goes bye-bye. Anyone else had similar experience. I'm pretty sure my wireless broadband is over 802.11b and the wire router I bought is 11b as well. Any solutions?
No Sig For You
"But at $79.99 a month, it's only a good deal to those who can write it off as a business expense."
This guy apparently doesn't know any geeks.
With VOIP becoming so popular, a laptop with this would be portable broadband and mobile VOIP all in one. That would be well worth the expense to lots of us.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I've used PCCard based wireless internet access devices in the past, and every one of them has been only "supported" on Windows, but every single one of them has simply emulated a standard COM port that required you to guess the particular "AT" command to bring up a PPP connecetion.
With data rates as high as claimed, this one may indeed be proprietary, although it would still, I believe, be *theoretically* possible to emulate a COM port that simply provided data a lot faster than you think it should (all of these virtual COM port style devices all ignored the baud rate setting anyway).
Can anyone confirm or deny? If you're using a Windows XP box, bring up the device mangler, properties of the device, Details, and give us the "Device Instance ID". Decoding that should tell us about the attachment (PCCard or Cardbus) and if it's Cardbus, should give us PCI vendor/device ID info.
Verizon has no competition at this speed and won't for a while. Carriers using the competing GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) wireless standard aren't close; for instance, AT&T's new EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution) service tops out at 200 kbps.
So ATTWS has EDGE nation wide, and Verizons EvDO is only in a 2 markets. ATTWS already has UMTS trials in 7 major markets, at speeds faster than verizon, soon to launch commerically!
So you dont hear it much, ATTWS has the fastest nation wide network. When Cingular takes over, and the 2 merges coverage areas, expect the best nation wide coverage, and fastest speeds around.
I'm just wondering when Cingular starts expanding UMTS past the 7 markets, what will Verzion do? It cant offer what it doesnt have, or built out. Be interesting to see what Verizon does to counter the Cingular advantage.
Does it do Linux?
3G has been put off for a long time, i'm suprised it hasn't come until now. This (to the best of my knowledge) qualifies itself as 3G. From a company like verizon I believe it. Rikachet failed because it was a solo project of a company that relied on their wireless internet service only. Verizon is already well-established and doesn't need this to produce revenue immediately. As far as $80/month being too much, take a look at how many people pay $50/month to bluetooth through their cell-phone with increadibly long login time and unreliable service-coverage.
By the way, this article was written by a reporter who probably either didn't know very much about the technology or was addressing it as being nice and easy to use, even for lusers (the "difficult to get working in a PC" comment). He claims it works wonderfully without any problem, he hasn't been payed to say it, and didn't say very much of anything on the negative side about it. This technolgy is not new (look at japan) I suggest you save your tinfoil for annother day's hat.
Nextel appears to be doing the same thing. Those in the Raleigh/Durham area can sign up for a free trial for a couple of months yet I think. More details are here.
The article leaves out some interesting details. Like--how many antennas per square kilometer do you need to get this kind of speed? When I lived in Santa Cruz, Ricochet did one of their first deployments around town. This was in the early 90s, so you were getting 2400bps (yeah, bps) wireless all over town, which was kind of cool. Except they had to hang transmitters from every other light pole to blanket town. I think that's one of the reasons they never caught on: deploying infrastructure was too expensive.
It sounds to me like Verizon has something with much better range going here, but I guess Pegoraro didn't think to ask.
One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream. The town (population 500) is about an hour's drive over a terrible mountain road from civilization, so the local CLEC never bothered to run phone lines in: they just set up this crappy microwave link on top of a mountain.
No cable, no wired phone lines: needless to say, broadband is impossible (satellite being the unacceptable semi-exception). Which makes going back to hang out at the ranch pretty annoying.
The point (I'm getting there!) is that if these guys have figured out a way to get high speed internet to travel a good long distance, this could help solve the access problem for rural america.
Of course, I've seen so many supposed solutions come and fade away, that I sort of doubt it.
\
The other day I was talking to some Qualcomm guys (who do the chipsets) and they told me this basically works by using an entire channel multiplexed in time. Since the service has not yet been widely deployed, the reviewer probably got most or all of the available time slots. I'd imagine the average bit rates to go down as the number of users increases.
I get unlimited MB for $20 a month through my T-Mobile GPRS connection via Bluetooth. Way slick, and I get dialup speeds consistently. I don't see 3G and semi-3G services gaining in popularity until they start to get down to that level. GPRS is good enough, at that price.
---
thewired.blogs.com/teotwawki
the techno-mediated cultural conspiracy
...for a while now, but the more I think of it, and knowing monopolies, the more dubious this whole thing becomes. They've announced the nationwide rollout "by year's end" this last January. Problem is, as someone already pointed out, they don't support Bluetooth phones, nor even USB. In other words, the "DO" in 1xEV-DO seems to mean "it's the card or else." Not to mention it's also Windows "or else." Since my 12" PB has BlueTooth but no PCMCIA slot, and since Windows would be out of the question even if I owned an x86-based laptop, it's pretty much a non-starter still. Supposing they get around to supporting Macs and maybe even Bluetooth, I'd still be suspicious of having to run any "installers" reminiscent of PPPoE and spyware. Is it going to support my VPN, which I currently use without problems with my T-Mobile Hotspot account? I'd be happy to upgrade from $30/mo for "Starbucks only" to $80/mo for "everywhere," but it seems to me there are so many roadblocks ahead, there might as well be no service and no expansion plans at all. It might happen eventually, but it's probably just as likely that some other, better company, maybe even a non-monopoly, will roll out something better first.
mack == good
whack == not good
It took them over a month to connect my DSL. It's a long story. They are incompetant. They are probably breaking a handfull of FCC rules. I want very much to never do business with them again and I encourage others to avoid doing business with them.
Start Running Better Polls
There's similar service already running here in BC run by Fido (Microcell) Check out the link ifdo Not sure about the Technology it uses, the website is not very forthcoming about the specs.
This sounds pretty similar to Monet Mobile, which was available in my area for a while. I got ~800kbps pretty consistently. They folded recently, which is disappointing. The coverage is much like cell. In fact, I was given to understand that most of their towers were shared with Sprint. On the major downside, it forced me to have a winbox around though I have 6 macs. They kept promising Linux/*nix modules, but they never appeared. The coverage was surprisingly good, but limited to city limits. I've gotta resort to SprintPCS when on the road.
art is the brevity of essence
It clearly states that the software is Micro$oft Winblows only.
That's great Verizon how about making my DSL suck less and quite being an infrastructure pirate and let some other service provider into my area.
Something intelligent here.
Basicly what it does is use unused cell bandwidth for downstream - a cell transmitter is suprisingly like a cable modem - it continually transmits ATM packets, some of which have voice in them, the rest are empty and available - the main difference is that as targets get further away they start piling on extra hamming codes to keep the error rate low. Since most cells sites run pretty emptry (so they can can handle peak loads) there's spare bandwidth available for the cell companies to sell you - provided you're prepared to come 2nd to the local voice traffic
1. EVDO is *shared* so things are nice now as there are few users per sector or cell. Once you've got Joe Luser on it, thinking it's "wireless DSL" or "Wireless Cable," service is going to get hosed.
2. Security. There is *no* security. The mobiles (i.e. PCcards) don't have *any* unique identification i.e. MAC addresses etc. The system relies on authentication on an AAA server. I can think of several very easy DOS attacks, especially near a critical cell. Did I mention that a cell can handle at most around 48 active users?
3. VOIP does not and will not work. Latencies are far too high to support any kind of real time audio.
4. Unlike EDGE/GPRS/UMTS, EVDO eats spectrum. The other standards co-exist with voice. This doesn't. Expect the service to fade away once EVDV comes out.
There's a very small niche market for this service: real estate, insurance, and other mobile users. For everyone else, 802.11 will do nicely, thank you very much.
Also, there's a major difference in the deployment as done by Lucent (east coast) and Nortel (west coast) in terms of performance and cost. Of course, Verizon will charge the same amount regardless of where you are.
get yourself a kyocera 2235 phone and a serial cable. this will allow you to use verizon's 1x network (nationwide) at 130 kbps. the neat thing about the 2235 is that there are no drivers required - the phone speaks hayes commands all by itself - i have even hooked it up to a dial-up router to share connections with multiple computers. oh and if you take the cable off, you can use the phone as a phone.
1x EV-DO time-shares the bandwidth amongst users. The guy writing the article either was using a priviledged "press only" subnetwork, or the overall network doesn't have many users.
The raw throughput of an EV-DO radio channel is about 2.4 Mbps. At 600 kbps, the author was given about 25% of the capacity. Get 30-50 users on the same EV-DO channel and feel the chokage. Monthly price doesn't change though... funny that.
I can see the commercial now...
[Annoying Verizon twit walking around in wannabe geek attire]
Can you ping me now?
[Pauses so camera gan see uber-cool propritary branded gadget BS]
Goood
[Walks off stage leaving camera showing oh-so self-important suits and wanna-be geek types watching in "shock and awe"]
[...and que fine print at bottom of screen scrolling so fast a hamster on crack can't even read it and Verizon Logo]
As I live in the raleigh area, I was quite happy to see this article a few weeks ago. I signed up and got in the six month beta. The service is still in beta stage and not allways up. The area covered is also quite small at the moment. But the speed is great. It is quite fast, I often see speeds of over 750 kbps down and 80 up. I get a ping of 50 from google.
The downside is they assign you a private ip address, and route you through a NAT. So bittorrent and game serving stink.
"The speed of broadband, the ease of WiFi and the coverage of cellular" is a good discription of the service, but I will be keeping my cable access untill they start handing out real ip addresses.
I hear it every...single..bleedin'...day on BART.
:P
The same clueless wonders are surprised when their phone cuts off as the train heads into a 2 mile tunnel, too.
I *HATE* Nextel phones for just that reason. People think that the rest of us want to hear both sides of their inane conversation.
KDDI in Japan does indeed offer 2.4megabit wireless unlimted use for $40 a month but that use is limited to on cellphone features (browsing the web on the cell phone and video on demand to the cell phone). Plug in into your computer and it's metered! :-(
Other wireless services in Japan are $45 a month unlimited but for only 64k connections.
Yes, I found him on skid row. He squeeked out a tearful story of hedonism/beastality, politicians, an unnamed pr0n studio and genetic engineering. He was quite traumatised, hence the drugs. Something about que cards and a spoof on a Bud Light commercial. I didn't ask.
Speaking for myself, I'm very excited about the growing segment of cell-phone based broadband. There are many of us who live 'just outside' of landline broadband's reach. 3/4 mile in my case. Because my street is so rural, Time Warner will never cable it, and the telco CO is over 20K feet away. There are ISP's in town (~12 miles away) offering WiFi but it's line of sight to a tower and it's very hilly around here. Can't see squat from my property. But I can receive a cell phone signal and we are served by Cingular, Verzion, and Nextel. If I understand these technologies right, it's almost like an NLOS wireless, which is perfect for people like me. Currently I use DirecWay satellite, and it's decent, but is hampered by very slow upstream speeds, brutal latency, and extremely restrictive bandwidth usage rules. I'd gladly pay Verizon's monthly asking price if their cell broadband were available here. Hopefully one day soon it will be.
I am an engineer who works for a company that makes base station-side software and hardware for this product. We are a supplier to Nortel, who is the general contractor for the San Diego deployment. Since I personally wrote a lot of the code that makes this stuff work, I can speak somewhat authoritatively on this technology.
First of all, EV-DO does scale. There are 5 million subscribers in Korea alone, shared between SK telecom and KT freetel. The technology has also been rolled out in a big way in Japan by KDDI recently.
It is true that the current Verizon deployment uses only PCMCIA cards. But phones are on the way later this year. There are dozens of EV-DO enabled phones and handheld devices available. Check out this page. EV-DO is data only, but nothing says that end-user devices cannot be EV-DO + 1x-RTT.
The article says that this is not "always on". That is misleading. EV-DO has the concept of "sessions" and "connections". Sessions are always on, and connections are on an as-needed basis. Connections are set-up when the user needs to send/receive data and torn down when he is done. This happens automatically, the user does not have to do anything special when he needs to do something. (For e.g., just click on a link on slashdot and a new connection is set up, data is uploaded and subsequently downloaded from the website, and the connection is torn down. All this happens automatically, the technology takes care of everything).
This is not a LAN technology. It is not a replacement for WiFi. This is a CDMA-based, cellular-WAN technology. It automatically provides all the security of a CDMA-based network. Not that this is perfect, but it is much better than WiFi in that w.r.t. security.
Hari.
3 years ago, I got tired of the holes in Sprint's coverage and switched to T-Mobile.
This weekend, I bought a Samsung SPH-i500 phone and had to get Sprint because that's the only service offered with the phone.
I figured, 3 years later, these guys must have fixed some of the problems with their network.
Nope. It's worse.
Lousy signal almost everywhere, and even if I get most of bars lit, people still get sent straight to voicemail when they call me.
SPRINT FUCKING SUCKS!
DON'T BUY SPRINT!
(I figure if I tell about 10 million people how lousy their service is maybe I'll get back a few hundred dollars of satisfaction to compensate me for the money I won't be able to recoup on the $500 phone because I'll be on the road for the next several months. So spread the word. Sprint sucks, has always sucked, and makes stupid excuses for continuing to suck.)
SprintBlows.Com is all you need to know about cellular service from the worst technical organization in the world.
Where can I find out more about this? Where do you see coverage maps and where to sign up?
Both the bandwidth and the price for this service are very close to what the Ricochet2 network would give you, for the short time that it was in existence before Ricochet tanked. In early 2001, I think it was, there was a huge storm, and I got stuck in a plane on the ramp at DFW for several hours. While my fellow passengers steamed and slowly went nuts, I caught up on email and surfed, at about 200 - 500kb/second, with my Ricochet2 modem up against the window. I never understood why Ricochet didn't advertise the actual throughput on their network, which was significantly in excess of what they claimed. Upstream, it was faster than the ADSL connection that I use at home now.