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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."
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
Haven't you heard about the potentially upcomming V710 from Motorola?
The big thing about EV-DO is that it's data-only, with no voice network with it. So the assumption is you just buy an EV-DO card and use that.
The other problem is that Bluetooth is unfairly been victimized by wifi hype and, at the same time, not yet been done "right" in such a way that it becomes a must-have feature.
Gentoo Sucks
Uhhh.... Verizon *is* the local bell muscling the market.
Gentoo Sucks
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)
The latency on CDMA 1xEV-DO isn't quite good enough to support VOIP. From the people I know who have used this service, it "feels" like a 56k modem in regard to its latency. (In a conversation on this site, Phil Karn pointed out that the latency isn't over the air interface, but elsewhere within the system)
In (I'm guessing) early 2005, Verizon, Sprint, should be rolling out a service based on 1xEV-DV. That will provide even higher data rates (in both directions), and (IIRC), voice calls will be VOIP by default!
Doh!
I've spent the last couple weekends war-walking the National Mall, Clevland Park, Capitol Hill and dupont circle. Woodley and Van Ness will be this weekend's projects. Suffice to say, war-driving in DC will NOT get you better coverage than Verizon.
;however, I've had little luck getting signal in the Capitol/Mall area.
There are lots of unprotected default "linksys" and "netgear" wireless points in the residential areas
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'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.
RTFA.
They are using 1xEV-DO from their cell towers, on dedicated cellular bands.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
Just choose a non-conflicting 11b channel for your wireless network. Try them all to see which one interferes the least. I think the 3 isolated channels are something like 1, 6, and 11. And hope your wireless internet isn't broadcasting on all channels. :)
http://ramp.ucsd.edu/~bellardo/darwin/airprime/
So shall I enable EVDO on your account now?
http://ramp.ucsd.edu/~bellardo/darwin/airprime/
I always liked the Ricochet model. Dead-simple low-power transmitters all over means that you can have tiny cells with only a few users per. Ricochet was intended only for the cities and only works "downtown". The good part is that they can tolerate the loss of an individual cell because of the overlap, which makes maintenence slightly easier. The trick would have been to also set up cell-tower-like relays in the surounding areas.
This is just using turbo codes and CDMA modulation with the same old antennas as a cell phone.
The technology has been there for the past few years to get broadband to your parent's town, but just not any interest in productizing it. However, as the Internet becomes more ingrained in people's lives, there's no choice.
Also, terminology help:
ILEC = Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier = local phone company
CLEC = Competitive Local Exchange Carrier = competition to the local phone company
Gentoo Sucks
You might be surprised but Nextel is becoming quite popular in the home market. I am very close friends with a family consisting of a father, mother, 3 kids, and an aunt and an uncle. Someone always needs to be picked up somewhere. Mother at the train station. Kids at various places. Grandparents all over the place. That family makes extensive use of the Nextel. My wife also pings me to come out and help bring in the groceries as she's pulling up to the house.
Finally, thanks to the free incoming calls and unlimited 2-way radio with my wife and best friend my chargeable minutes have dropped significantly. At worst, I used over 1,200 minutes. Then I added unlimited nights & weekends, and that dropped to about 500. Added free incoming calls, and that dropped to under 200! Now that my best friend has the 2-way, too, we ping each other all the time, and I'm thinking about dropping from the free incoming 400 to the free incoming 250.
It makes such a difference when you can get the point across without all the call setup hubub. Not the technical call setup stuff, the social stuff. "Hey, its me, got a minute?"
Now its, "[beep-beep] Can I reboot the server?" "[beep-beep] Sure."
Now that NASCAR's premiere racing series is Nextel Cup, you can expect a lot more subscribers to come online in the coming months and years. We are getting *bombarded* by Nextel ads these days.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I used to have T-Mobile GPRS with bluetooth, but it never lived up to its promise.
T-Mobile advertises its service as "broadband", but their salesforce tells you (even to this day) that in fact its about as fast as a 56k modem.
Unfortunately, neither claim is anywhere close to the truth:
I spent months on the phone with T-Mobile tech support, and heard again and again that the "3k per second transfer rate you're getting is part of a known issue and our engineers are working on it."
Bottom line: T-Mobile GPRS does not exist yet. You'll have max 5kbps with latency and timeout problems galore. Its busted.
By the way, they finally refunded me retroactively for the 4 months that I "had" the service. So they're liars... not thieves.
______________________________________
"I can't turn left. I'm not an ambi-turner"
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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
I live in FL and every backwoods, inbred, red-neck somebitch has one of those things! Personally, I hate'em. I really don't want to have to listen to all their stupid conversations when I'm queued up somewhere.
Your take is that it's lame? I agree, and I should know. I recently left a company that makes client adapters for this hardware (pcmcia cards and desktop adapters). While supporting this hardware, I learned that it's really a lot of hype. The documentation states that the maximum download speed is 1.5Mb. Sounds good on the surface...but actual download speeds depend on ambient radio noise, the shielding on your system processor, proximity to the nearest properly equipped cell site, the size and quality of your antenna and any of the other things that normally effect your cellular service. 1.5Mb......I saw 1.1Mb once or twice, but never 1.5Mb. For those of you who live in the boonies and want to use this service rather than your ISDN, don't bother. The upload speed leaves a lot to be desired. 114Kb is the maximum upload speed (I never saw anything faster than 80Kb). The author of the original article neglected to mention that this was deployed over 2 years ago by Monet Mobile Networks (http://www.monetmobile.com) in Minnesota and South Dakota. The good points are: 1. where it's available, the service is stable. 2. it beats dial-up for browsing the web. 3. It's capable of being mobile (expect drops) The bad points: 1. It's not cheap 2. The coverage areas are poor 3. no linux support (that I know of) 4. Slow upload speeds
"Lame" - Galaxar
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.
Sierra Aircard 750 drivers (GPRS) are available for Mac OS X too...
http://xochi.com/aircard
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 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.