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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
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?!?!
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.
http://ramp.ucsd.edu/~bellardo/darwin/airprime/
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.
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