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Cell Phone Service as High Speed Internet Link?
Gorm the DBA asks: "I live out in the boonies, where Cable is just another word for what the telegraph guy delivers and the nearest Central Office is over 27,000 feet away, so DSL is at best a (fat) Pipe Dream, and dialup speeds top out at 17,700baud on a good day. Currently we have satellite internet via DirecWay, but it's expensive ($60/month) and VPNlike applications are not supported, never mind gaming (high latency), which reduces it's utility dramatically. At the same time, I've been looking at getting a new cell phone. I see that Sprint, Cingular, and others all have cards that you can plug into your computer and use the cellular network to get data. The claim is 'wireless online surfing as fast as DSL'. I've confirmed I'm in the coverage areas, but is this really as good as they're making it sound? It's pricey ($79.99/month, plus the cost of the card), but it would be portable as well. Does anybody have experience with this sort of technology? Is it ready for prime time? Does it really work? Is it worth it? Is the internet access real, or a filtered 'You get what we want you to get' sort of thing?"
I've had to explain this to angry executives who couldn't dial in from the cottage/ski hill/resort so many times, I sound like a broken record. If you're in an area where the wired signal is awful, you can basically rest assured the wireless signal quality will be much worse. Wireless is by nature a less reliable medium, because it's passing through air and trees and walls -- as opposed to copper. If you're located somewhere so far from civilization that the wired infrastructure can't handle basic data, then neither will wireless. Don't believe the sales people. :\
Possible exception: your dad's the farmer who gave up part of his field for a cel phone tower. But even then don't bet on it.
Weak as piss.
Yeah, use it all the time when I can't get a real wired/wireless connection. It is as fast as DSL if your DSL service sucks, which in the U.S. it basically does.
We're talking a maximum of 128Kbps in either direction. I suppose if you've been conditioned to think of that as "broadband", then you'll be happy.
Convenient: Yes
Fast: No
From the links you gave, max speeds are a tad above ISDN/BRI, or twice that of a 56k modem. My guess is that since you're located in such a rural area, your coverage will be spotty. You'll have to decide if that's worth $80/month. If connect speed is that important, you might consider moving.
Of course, I understand that might not be an option. I spent the late 80's and early 90's at Loring Air Force Base, in northern Maine. Most of the POP's for the services I used were in southern Maine. I spent obscene amounts of money connecting. And yes, we were on Milnet, but I was in the Civil Engineering Squadron, and we had a 9600 baud connection through a Wang VS. I did manage to download Linux onto 5-1/4 floppies, but I digress.
Building out wireless is cheaper than building land line phone service.
Chances are, that you'll have great phone service in places where there are no land lines.
Many third world countries which never had land lines is skipping that step and going directly for wireless.
At least this is what I've heard.
I'd be glad if anyone could substantiate or refute this.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I've used this once with t-mobile and once with cingular. I can say the latency isn't horrible, but it's not great. 170-250ms or so. Bandwidth is another issue. With Cingular, I've gotten up to 300kb/s on their new service, with t-mobile up to 44kb/s. It's definately good enough to browse the web, but it's no way to live like I do now. It may actually be faster to change your codec on your phone and connect a data cable and use it as a dial-up modem. (T-Mobile)
I work with three people who use this sort of service. I don't know which provider(s) they use, but they all find it extremely useful. They are all consultants and typically when they work in an organization they are not there long enough to go through the bureaucratic process of getting corporate network access. These cards combined with their laptops allow them full access to everything they need including Outlook, web, ssh/telnet, VPN, etc. I have not heard them complain of reception problems, however, none of them are gamers so I don't know about latency issues.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
my partner lives on the wrong side of the road to get a cable modem. She lives 100 feet into the wrong central office district to get dsl, but she lives 1 mile from a sprint cell phone tower.
Trust me on this. It was a good deal for her.
i have a sony/ericsson gc83 edge high speed cellular card. i'm using the s/e software, not the cingular software.
service isn't that great - spotty at best. i get disconnected a lot and vpn'ing is terrible. when it does work. speeds are 0-115kbps, depending on what the app is requiring - burstable, not always xxx kbps.
i'm going to try the verizon evdo card - supposedly people get 300-500kbps...
For $79.00, it has to be great! I mean we are in America where you get what you pay for right? Comcast is $45.95 where I am at so it has to be better!
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
Regardless of whether it actually works, one thing you should keep in mind is how much you plan to use it. Most phone companies (I don't know about Cell companies) offer "unlimited long distance", for example. However - if you inquire it turns out that what they mean by "unlimited" is actually so many hundred or thousand minutes per month.
It really is going to depend on the type of service available to you. Sprint, Cingular and the other guys are all rolling out networks that will rival speeds of some DSL/Cable connections.
However, let's take Sprint for example. They offer CDMA 1xRTT service in just about their entire coverage area, which tops out at a theoretical maximum of 144 kbps. I've used this service. It works pretty well, at higher than dialup speeds, 80-100 kbps, but the latency continues to be just as bad, or worse than dialup, as well as inconsistent, which is a no go for the gaming. Sprint, Verizon, Alltel and probably the other CDMA carriers are rolling out CDMA EV-DO, which will offer between 600-800 kbps typical speeds. At that point, it is a good replacement for traditional access methods.
I can't speak for the GSM carriers, as I'm not as familiar with how their high speed networks are coming along.
Basically, it is probably better than what you have now, but for downloading, etc, I'd stick with the satellite connection until the next generation data networks are available in your area.
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
I use a portable internet system that works off the cell towers around where I live, but the latency is terrible, don't dream about gaming on it unless you're going to play turn-based games. Even in the middle of the city the reception is terrible because of all the interferance.
Cingular as EDGE speeds up to 384kbps
Sprint tops out around 144kbps
Verizon EVDO speeds I've heard can go up to a mbit, IF you live in a EVDO coverage area... which isn't likely.
You can purchase a normal/average EDGE GSM phone (make sure it is class 10 EDGE) and and get Cingulars 24$/mo unlimited data plan and purchase a data cable for your phone -> computer and do it that way... screw their 79$/mo edge data card prices.
What was your username again? -BOFH
Wouldn't it be more practical to attempt to use a high gain antenna to ride a public hotspot in this case? If you have line of site there are a number of easy DIY solutions that use parabolic/round direct dishes and wee bit of simple soldering of a tin can web guides available.
I have a Treo 600 with Verizon. It takes close to four minutes to download cnn.com and about three minutes to download slashdot.org. It's useless except for emergencies. Too bad we got ripped-off for $120/month with a one year contract for an unlimited bandwidth. No one will ever use that much bandwidth, because no one has that kind of patience.
PS: What's with the horrible graphic now? It took me about six tries to figure-out what letters were. Is Slashdot now intentionally trying to exclude those of us with small monitors?
I've had marginal success with a cell phone and accoustic modem, but it is no where near Cable or DSL data rates. It's as bad as 28.8kbps, so I use Lynx. I mostly use an accoustic modem on payphones, then use an internet phone. Ah well. Cellphone internet access is for prisoners, really; it's only good on the weekends for no-cost. Realistically, we need to not neglect two-way radios as much as we do today. I can't name one company, besides a taxi service, that uses CB radios. It would really help us all out, with these pay services that are becoming more and more an unwarranted necessity on Resume's.
without prejudice
I'm assuming the package you'd like to use is either a GPRS package, or EDGE. If it's EDGE, you're going to have a GREAT time browsing around at high speed!
If it's simple GPRS, however, then I'm afraid those DSL speeds you're dreaming of are not going to materialize.
I used to have GPRS on my cellphone here in Beirut, Lebanon. I could browse WEBsites (not just WAP) on my phone, even download files (Applications, Videos, etc..) at around 5KB/sec (equiv. to a 56k modem)
The problem is, the package is quite pricey ($30 for 40MB of bandwidth, and a dollar for every MB after that)
All in all, not really worth it. I've connected it to my laptop and there really is barely any difference in speed between it and my 56k modem, and considering I pay by the megabyte, suffice to say I've canceled the service a long time ago.
If you're getting EDGE, however, then let's just say you're going to be really pleased!
. . . . . . . . . there's quite a lot of latency.
We're talking on the order of 2 to 3 seconds. It's OK for reading webpages and downloading files, but for VOIP or any other lag-sensetive operation (like SSH), it's absolute crap.
Sprint's service also filters images to reduce their size.
As far as I know, it's fairly open (I was able to SSH over it), but I don't know exactly how open.
Apparently my post uses too many junk characters, so now I'm just going to ramble on for a bit. Sprint's service is OK, but I don't think they're offering the unlimited service anymore, and as I recall the data-only service (which you'd get for the PC) is more expensive. Plus it's high latency, which makes it seem slower than it really is. I get about 12KB/s on a decent signal (like two to three bars), if you've got a better signal you might get a better connection speed. If it's worse, you might get something that's about as good as flakey dial-up, but I don't really know. Still too many junk characters. OK. I'll keep on talking then. If you really have no other option, it might be your best bet. But it's really intended for web surfing and doesn't work as well for anything else. I don't know what the upload rate is, but it's probably very poor. Ah, here we go.
We looked into the cell option versus cable, and here were the two show-stoppers for us (Cingular, YMMV):
;)
1. "Not all protocols are supported". No further eludication. Good luck finding somebody who knows if ssh or whatever you might realize you need in the future is supported.
2. "No bulk downloading JPEGS". I *guess* maybe they are saying they don't want you to download pr0n with their service, but I can think of legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, such as mirroring web sites for personal use. (terraserver anyone?
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
Congratulations, you're making progress toward the metric system! Next step is to use the kiloyard and then you're 91.44% there.
in fact, i spent the day after helping a customer with a data link cable for his phone, searching the net for solutions to this up and coming question.
:> !). From what I was able to find, only a small portion of phones are capable of performing this relatively simple (in theory) task and windows is the required OS. Once more phones, older and newer, are able to do this, I see a whole new market opening up and capturing the road warrior market segment who wants to be able to drive from place to place never having to worry if they're going to be able to find a place to link up. It's all going to be available via using your cell phone, datalink cable, and your laptop.
I think there are a great many questions and (hopefully) solutions that will follow.
What needs to happen, is the service needs to be made available to every one. Including those who, like myself, are credit challeneged. By that, I mean like TracFone, and INpluse pre-pay agreements from Verizon, potential users should be allowed to purchase internet time for their mobile phone units and access the national digital network necessary for these types of communications. The technology is there, it just needs more compatibility (hello mac people
It's a slick idea and it really needs to happen quickly.
If you get good digital cell phone reception, I'd expect it to work fine. Otherwise not, obviously. Just go to the local retailer and explain that you want to try before you buy. The salesperson assured me that I could a 30 day no obligation trial, given that coverage wasn't certain.
I had to take him up on it, and spent a few minutes explaining this trial to cingular when I came in to return the phone. Apparently, it isn't standard operating procedure. They buckled nicely after a few firm words. Given that their employee did promise, I didn't feel bad about it.
So, yes it works, but faster than DSL? I dunno, seems pretty slow to me, but then again, it could just be my phone.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
check and see if there is a WiFi provider within a few miles. I am 6 miles out, but I can see the WiFi provider's AP with Binoculars. I get 786K down, and 256K up, Not bad for being out in the boonies.
I've been looking into wireless service for my shiny new Zaurus SL-C3000. T-Mobile offers unlimited internet access via GPRS for $29.99/month here:e rnet
http://www.t-mobile.com/plans/default.asp?tab=int
It won't be as fast as Sprint's 1xRTT so it may not be what you're looking for but it's much cheaper and may be faster than your current line.
The non-techies absolutely hate it. It's not ready for prime time. It's just not consistent enough, and the poor performance (and outages) just don't justify it. Non-techies don't know how to recover when the connection drops. The geeks just accept the outages as "better than with no access all the time". My experience is that reliability is far below normal cell phone exxperience. Think of every time your cell phone has a disconnect or a crappy connection. Multiple that by 5 times.
It works; the latency is bad, but not as bad as satellite. I get about 450ms ping to most servers in my country (US).
:)
The bandwidth is limited by two things: Network throughput and network load. I believe that the fastest (non-major-city) cell phones go up to 155kbps (I get 15.2 max kBps.) I'm using Sprint because, when I researched it a year ago, they and Verizon had the fastest networks for this sort of thing. Network load just means that if there are lots of people on the same tower as you, your connection will not run at full speed. I've rarely seen that happen with mine.
Run a search on different types of cell networks and make sure you have a signal with a fast one. I used to use Nextel, and it was like 1/5 the speed of dialup with 1000msec latency and downtime. That was on the old analog network.
Also, you know you can buy powered signal boosters for every type of signal? If you're in the boonies and want more signal, you might get one of those.
Email me if you want, put slashdot into the subject
I bought a USB data cable for my LG verizon phone (from ebay, about $7 with shipping)... it came with drivers for windows, and if I recall I was getting 64kbps type speeds. Also, there is no extra charge for data... they charge minutes only.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At the rick of destroying my server, I have a post about using a little embedded linux box and a verizon aircard as a router for industrial automation equipment. Link to post on my company web page This is an Aircard 555 using the 1xRTT 115K baud down and ( I hate Verizon ) 14.4 K up. I have a feeling that the newer high speed aircards need to be in a windows box, as I have yet to find anyone who has one working with linux. I would be almost certain that the up speed is also pathetic. This does work well for what we use it for, and I just got back from my cabin in Michigan where we used it along with an Airport Express to serve up WiFi to the kids with laptops. (not that they would notice the beautiful outdoors. Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I use verizon wireless, and when it does get connected, i get a 1 meg link during the evening and about 500kbit/sec during the day.
the latency is tolerable, ~180ms to 200ms, which makes remote controlling possible, but gaming is pretty much out (think modem days)
other than that, it is portable, connecting at 115kbit in some areas, or at work 14.4kbit in 0 coverage areas....
doesn't work in canada tho...
The speeds you get are still related to your distance from the tower in CDMA networks. In GSM ones they are more consitant but have a sharp drop off at certain ranges. If you are within range for a 2.5g or 3.0g GSM network then it's exactly what you need (abietly at a much higher price then dsl or cable). If it's CDMA, milage may vary (ie. Band width may vary).
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I've used my cell phone to connect to the 'net on occasion. The speed actually impressed me, considering the road those packets were having to travel, but the latency was horrendous. It seemed like the connection would burst data at a high speed for a second or two, then completely pause for a second or two.
Worked fine for e-mail and casual web browsing, but if you're interested in gaming, keep looking.
I have used the PCMCIA Sprint wireless card when I was a consultant and traveled quite a lot. It is ok, I wouldn't quite say it is DSL speed, probably closer to ISDN speed or slightly faster. Certainly a good alternative if you want something faster then dialup. Just make sure you get good wireless signal in your area before you even bother.
This is correct. Many areas of Africa finally getting some cash in hand, or from the US, are skipping the wired step, and going right to wireless.
Its easiar to put up a tower then it is to string miles of conductor.
Hell, 90% the people my age at work don't have land lines, they have cellphones.
Why not see if you can find a local guru to link up a T-1 in "town" and put up a small dish/tower to serve a few of you folks with some high speed via wireless. It won't be a money machine, but if you find perhaps 10 people paying the same $75, you should be able to cover the T-1 and hardware within the first year. NOT portable, very good potential quality.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobileoptions/b roadband/index.jsp
"..at typical speeds of 400-700 kbps, capable of reaching speeds up to 2 Mbps."
Works as advertised. When not in a broadband area works at lower "national" speed of about 100 kbps.
If the latency for the DirecDish is an issue for you, then the latency from the celphone wireless will likewise be an issue.
I've linked my PDA and my laptop to my celphone via USB, IR, and bluetooth. I've tried it with 3G(1x) via SprintPCS(vision) and Cingular GPRS/EDGE.
All I can say is that on a celphone, you expect there to be delays. It is, afterall, a low-processing power device. On the laptop, websurfing is "okay".
With SprintPCS's vision plan, I found that I got a pretty good xfer rate of around 60kilobits per second to around 120 kilbits per second. Yes, that is kiloBITS. So, compared to the poster's dial-up speeds, that is much better. Note, though, that this is near a cel-tower with good reception.
In poor reception areas, you can expect around 9.6kilobits per second to around 14.4 kilobits per second.
If that's your only option, then it isn't a bad way to go. The highest speed you will be able to achieve is around 144 kilobits/second with the current generation of tech. This should grow to around 384kilobits per second as more of the next-gen tech arrives, but it still isn't what it should be. SprintPCS Vision does some kind of caching and image compressing, so you will get better rates, but lower quality images for web pages.
With Cingular, GPRS gives you 14.4kilbit/sec dial-up connection. With EDGE, you are supposed to be able to get 384 kilobits/second. I've experienced issues where given a good signal, you will still get less than admirable rates due to contention with other folk and with other voice usage of the network.
Verizon has their EVDO which is promising 1.5mbit/second capabilities(wireless DSL, basically). Haven't used them yet, but people who have used them say they are pretty good. They have pretty good coverage as well, so that might be an option. Without EVDO, you are basically dealing with the normal "wireless dialup" speeds as noted above.
If you are thinking of doing gaming, voip, etc... look elsewhere. For email, web surfing, and maybe newsgroups... ie, non-time sensitive applications, then wireless connectivity could be a good fit.
Another option is perhaps a long-distance 802.11b/g link with a neighbor. Ie, find someone who actually has a chance of getting good service. Work out an agreement with them and then have them setup a line-of-sight wireless (wifi) link to your place.
You become dependant on them for connectivity and possibly end up investing more in hardware, but you will have much better bandwidth and much better latency for games/voip/etc.
Winged Power Photography
I was surprised to find out I get this type of speed on my cell with sprint. The latency is about 300-600 and isn't too stable but it works pretty good for downloading or some web browsing. We use it at my company for snyching our service tickets with the main office wirelessly.
I have the service and travel all over the US. So far I've found exactly ONE (1) location where I got "Near DSL" speeds - mostly it's like plain old dialup. I keep it for the convenience. I have, at a minimum, dialup capability no matter where I am - in a client office without a drop, in the airport with no wi-fi, in the car... And I can run Skype over it as well, so I always have a phone with no time limit and no roaming...
Things are looking up. More hi-speed areas are coming - but they are major metro areas. If I were you I woulcn't plan on getting any kind of decent throughput out in the sticks..
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
An additional interesting question is whether you can get high-speed access for your computer by connecting to your handset rather than paying for the extra PC card and separate service.
Obviously the carriers would rather sell you two things instead of just one, and they may even pretend it's not possible to use your handset as a broadband "modem". But I have heard that in fact it is possible.
Does anyone have any experiences to share about this?
At this point in technology of America your choice of Cell versus Satellite is almost a wash on speed, latency, and coverage. The only thing I'd recommend that you base it on is whether you plan to use it away from home where you won't otherwise have a hot spot to attach to. If you need to move much more than 50 ft from home, go with cell, otherwise go with Satellite.
You noted that Satellite was expensive at $60 / month, where you'll likely spend $80 / month on Cell. If cost is that much of a concern, I wouldn't even suggest Cell if you need to move around.
except I'm not a million miles from civilization - time warner just decided that they didn't want to run cable down my street, despite the fact that there are 17 houses per mile (1.5 miles of road).
I've been fighting with them for almost 2 years now and so far I haven't gotten anywhere. They want me to pay $26,000 to have the cable run down the road so they can make money on everyone else on the street who is also dying for high speed internet & cable TV.
anybody have any suggestions?
there is a cell tower within a half mile of my house, and I did look into the highspeed wireless service, but at the time the drivers for the required pcmcia card were windows only (I need something that will work with OSX).
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
Check out kansas sometime... Old school 1970's party line switches rusting in the CO. But perfect 5 bars of Cingular EDGE data service everywhere... in the middle of nowhere.
Don't expect that old party line switch to EVER be upgraded.
Actually some of the wired carriers are using "fixed" wireless to provide service to these areas. Basically a small box with a cell station on one side, and a POTS connection on the other.
Happy surfing with the cows!
MOOOOO
It's also worth pointing out that the two providers you mentioned, Sprint and Cingular, are both poor providers for rural areas. I live in a reasonably sized metropolitan area (Madison, WI), but my Cingular signal is frequently gone before I've hit the county line if I'm not following the Interstate. I also have a Sprint company phone while I'm on the road, and the situation is even worse - the only reason why Sprint PCS can claim a bigger coverage map than most GSM networks is that, being TDMA (I think), they have the option of using most anyone's towers for roaming service.
And, as the parent mentioned, the sales people (and the coverage maps) exaggerate the coverage greatly. My signal is usually gone long before I've come anywhere near the edges of the spots they've colored in on the map in the sales brochure.
If you live that far out, don't even think about signing a contract before you've had a friend who gets their cellular service from the provider you're considering over to your house to see how good the signal is. And do it on a few different days, because weather conditions like cloud cover can have a large impact on the range of a cell tower.
We had a company that tried to offer this service in duluth. Some guy I work with also worked at this place. We tried it, honestly we tried it. Several different machines, several different cards, sevaral different locations. Bottom line: There was a cell tower less than 100yards away, perfect signal, we'd never lost a cell phone call there in 3 years of living there. Data thruput was virtually nil. DSLReports came back with 98% dropped/lost packets. Didn't work there. Felt bad too, becuase we worked with the guy. The company went out of business. No suprise really, considering.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
I used the verizon low speed service for a long while. It's only $5 a month on top of their service, and it's actually pretty fast. It's marketed as dialup speeds, but it's actually double that (10k realistic throughput).
It's got horrible latency, though, so you can forget gaming. Just to test, I fired up counterstrike to test, and I get latencies between 1-3k, the same as in other games I tested.
Now, this was the low speed service, but I doubt the high speed service has better latency. However, for $5 a month, it was an awesome internet connection for a mobile home.
-=Lothsahn=-
Sometimes this service might be the right choice for your main IP connection, if you don't have DSL or CATV options, but the main reason for IP over cellphone technology is mobility.
Fiat Lux.
I recently spent some time in Namibia (southwestern Africa) and can confirm this from firsthand experience. Almost no one has a land line, even in places where they're available (and that's pretty rare). Everyone uses GSM... and they all use prepaid plans too rather than monthly-fee plans. It's pretty wild.
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
SprintPCS is a CDMA company. They have a roaming agreement with Verizon and I remember awhile ago they had a $5 option for no roaming charges. Not sure if that's still around though.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
I live out in the boonies
;-)
Move to a nearby (or even far away) city. There is more to life-in-the-city than broadband, however broadband does make life-in-the-city easier.
The cingular card works here (Dallas/Fort Worth) and http://dslreports.com/ tests my connection at 170K sec (down) consistently. Up stream is even faster. That is better than my DSL was until I upgraded to it to the 3Mb connection. I have only used it for a week so far, but so far, so good.
In the meantime, find out if anyone else near you is a tech-head and wants a phat connection. You might be surprised how many are in your shoes. Then it might be feasable to collectively approach the b-width issue by co-op or commune methods. Ask geeks from China... They are blazing neighborhood hotspots using that exact method because individually many do not have the $$ to do it alone. Usually areas have no or lo coverage due to a false perception of no demand.
Must be a bitch when an agent is chasing ya.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, as just a lay opinion from someone who used to work at a place that sold cell service, the rule of thumb is just that it varies. If you are really concerned about whether or not you will get good service, just ask the place you are buying it from. Read the brochure's fine print, and find out how long you can try it for and give it back. Generally , there is a trial period where you can back out of the contract (used to be 15 days for Sprint.) Just get it, and if it's not what they say, return it.
What are the average downloading speeds via Bittorrent or HTTP? What is the average ping when you play a game such as call of duty? Is there a monthly limit on bandwidth? What kind of restrictions are placed on internet use? I havent looked into the cell internet but in MY area the only option avalible to out of towners is Microwave wireless internet which is cheaper than this cell internet and is offered at speeds faster than a T1 line.
Has tmobile gotten better.
Last time I had data on a laptop and checked pings we were talking around 3000 ms ping times, sometimes as high at 5000ms. Best was at least 1000ms.
For anything interactive it was absolutly horrible.
Cheers,
Greg
I'm in the same situation as the article poster. I get 26400 bps on a good day. I live about 15 miles west of Lansing, Michigan. Right on a county line and only 4 miles from the towns on either side of me (Well, if you can call one a town, with only a few hundred people. The other has a few thousand.) Cable and DSL are both out of the question. DirecWay/Satilite isn't really all that great either, with the extremely high costs, high latencies, and AUPs.
I believe my best bet is to simply wait until someone sets up a WiMAX antenna in Lansing or one of the other nearby cities, but Intel is just now starting to make the chips. Manufacturers will need to start making the boxes, and then someone will need to setup a network. Even then I don't expect it to be much less expensive than satilite.
Back a few years ago I even quoted Charter on bringing their lines down the rest of the way, which is about 9/10ths of a mile. At $100 for every 10 feet the price came to $47,520; at that price I should own the line.
Does anyone know if the latencies on WiMAX are going to be much better than satilite? I assumed they would be, because the signal only has to go only about a dozen miles rather than thousands.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
I use Cingular + Sierra Wireless' AirCard 775 in a variety of suburban, rural and urban areas in Oregon and California. This card is capable of EDGE, GPRS, and GSM service.
Performance is highly variable. As you might expect, if cellular coverage is bad, EDGE/GPRS performance is going to be even worse.
Cingular's communication client rates the signal strength in 1 to 5 "bubbles."
In practical terms, you'll need a minimum of 2 bubbles to make any meaningful connection. Connection speeds at this level will feel a lot slower than dial-up, with generally miserable results. A lot of websites will appear to time-out at this level.
GMail, for example, is extremely sensitive to latency/connection strength, and will generally not work with two bubbles.
Using this in a moving car will cause the signal strength to fluctuate as you move between towers. In rural and suburban areas, you'll see a surge to three bubbles, and just as you type in a URL, it'll drop to one bubble, and the website will time out. This is a pretty frustrating surfing experience, but varies depending on the website.
If you're in a nonmoving location, in an urban area, and signal strength is stable between three to five bubbles, it will feel somewhat like dial-up -- don't believe the Cingular ads; the reality falls far short.
Due to compression effects, entering a URL in your browser will result in a lag... where you wait a beat... or two... and then the webpage will appear reasonably quickly.
VPN works as long as your signal strength is constant, but downloading large volumes of email (e.g. my morning download usually exceeds 200 emails) is an experience you'll avoid after suffering through it a few times.
In summary, useful when you have no other choice, highly specific to where you're connecting from, and iffy on the move in non-urban areas.
That said, you can't criticize how well the bear dances -- you should be amazed that it dances at all.
Regards,
StevenC
It will definately not be faster to "hook a cable up to your phone and connect through dialup" Your GSM channel is barely wide enough to send the voice through after the error correction, you would be lucky to get 9600 baud. Wiith GPRS or EDGE service it combines multiple radio channels and Time Slots to give you higher data rates. Some service on EDGE can get you up to 384Kbps. There will be some encoding overhead depending on signal quality, but its not unusual to see greater than 240Kbps on the line. UMTS service can boost that well past 768Kbps... but good luck finding that in the US until 2012. (Europe and Japan are already there)
When I was in India people were using their cell phone service with a simple adapter for their phone for internet access. They would usually get better and faster connection than dial-up. And since they usually knew what they were doing (checking email, grabbing info) they could do it quickly. ... I have no idea how widespread the practice may have been or how economical.
Linux Resources
Speeds are limited to teh capacirty of the cell tower, most towers are linked up t1's so basically your gonna pull 1.554
see if you can get something like etheric
Where exactly do you live? My parents live in taht area, and they have some options for broadband; they just don't like the price.
Verizon calls their EV-DO service 'BroadbandAccess'; I have it on an Audiovox XV6600 phone (Windows Mobile and phone).
My experience
The service works very well and has been as reliable as my cellular voice calls. I forget it's there or that it's anything revolutionary, which is a good sign of it's usability. Latency is high, but it's just a little annoying in practice; I haven't tried anything interactive like chat, but some people claim to have used VOIP and iChat video conferencing with great success -- see these resources for that and other useful info:
http://evdoinfo.com/
http://evdoforums.com/
Note that upload speed is only promised to be 60-80 Kbps.
The Audiovox XV6600 phone is low quality: Bugs, crashes, talktime way too little (extra/larger battery almost required) , earpiece volume too low, bluetooth problems, etc etc etc. For early adopters only, really. I wanted it EV-DO badly enough, so I decided to live with it. The best resources on the phone (really an HTC Blue Angel, rebranded):
http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://www.pdaphonehome.com/
The phone is ~$45/month for unlimited service. A pcmcia card is ~$80/month. Note that the terms of service prohibit using the phone as to provide access to other devices.
Terms of service
Verizon's terms of service probibit downloading or streaming music, and other things. If you use the phone, the terms prohibit using it to bridge Internet service to other devices. More details here:
http://evdoforums.com/about77.html
OTOH, I've never heard of that being enforced, but I'm not sure that I would.
Vendor plans for rollout
Some info here:
http://evdoforums.com/forum-9.html
With my Samsung Phone (via USB) with Verizon speed and usability are pretty OK. On the "3x" network (only in major metropolitan areas and major coridors) I've seen real speeds of about 225k both ways, on the "national" (1xRtt) network (most anywhere with digital signal) I've gotten between 19 and 75k depending on signal strength. Defiately OK for surfing the web and checking e-mail, but by no means "high-speed". A lot of phones also have undocumented analog modem capability, My Samsung A310 will function as a 9600 baud analog modem on even analog cell towers by calling a real dial-up number as opposed to Verizon's supported access shortcuts. It works, but is NOT a replacement for real broadband or even DirecWay. I'm a Direcway installer (among other things "outside of my job description"), and a well tuned Direcway connection on one of the good satellites (AMC9!) will thump the Cell network any day, except for burst uploads and latency.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
The connection speed has to do with the hardware installed in your area. Instapundit has one of those cards and gets 122kbps in Knoxville. I'd guess that that's the best you can do unless you live in one of those "real cities".
Unless you spend A LOT of time on the road, the mobile cell cards just aren't worth the money.
I have a Verizon account. I have actually had it for a couple of years and it has improved markedly over time.
/. article on the "Stompbox" Verizon to WiFi mobile hot-stop.
b roadband/index.jsp
Verizon has two classes of available service. You can use a single PC-CARD adapter that will auto-switch depending on which service is available to you. There is even another
If you are lucky enough to be in a Verizon EVDO "Broadband" access area, you can expect 2 Megabits "peak" downstream speed. Not sure what the peak upstream speed is. Regardless, if I have reasonable single strength, I get about 500kbit down and 80kbit up. I think it is fair to call this "DSL speed". Even though the speed is good, the latency is still a bit high at about 200-250ms.
At this point, the "Broadband" access areas currently cover about 30 cities. If you are really "out in the woods", I would be very surprised if you are in one of these areas, but you can check. This is a list of the broadband access cities:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobileoptions/
If you are not in one of the "Broadband" areas with EVDO coverage, you can still use the 1xRTT service throughout most of the rest of the country. 1xRTT gives you theoretical 144kbit down. I tend to get about 60-80 kbit down and 20kbit up, so this is just a bit faster than dialup. The kicker with 1xRTT is the the latency goes up to 400-800 ms.
If you are somewhere with "digital" coverage from Verizon, then you will probably be able to get decent 1xRTT coverage.
You might want to consider borrowing a friends verizon phone and see what type of signal it sees at your house. If you see a decent "1X" digital signal, then the 1xRTT will probably work ok.
If terms of what the service looks like while using it, it is a pretty typical ISP account. You get a DHCP public IP address. I have not noted any port filtering, but have not scanned looking (it does allow me to send email thru my corporate mail server on port 25). The adapter has a tendency to go into "dormant" mode, so you can see some lags if you need to wake up an ssh connection or similar.
In terms of end-user agreements, it is also a pretty standard client type service. No servers, no permanent connections, etc.
With these limitations, I am still very happy with the service. When they first came out with what was called "Express Network" (which was the first 1xRTT rollout), the connectivity was spotty, you would have to dial-in three or four times, and moving from cell to cell was a nightmare. For the last year or so, things have gotten a lot better.
In the end, you have to decide if $80/mo is worth it. For me, being able to reboot servers from the middle of the California desert, even at dial-up speeds, is a godsend. Plus my wife loves to IM with her friends at 70 MPH (of course not while driving).
in my area they havn't yet deployed the 'high speed' part of the service yet. The promise they will open up the pipe sometime in 2005. (we all know how that goes)
... although I'm really not sure what that means... The High Speed access is being beta tested in Washington D.C. and San Diego. I was in SAn Diego last summer and had the opportunity to preview the 'High speed' access. I think I saved my performace graph from a bandwith test site:
I'm a Network Administrator and we give these card to all of our systems installers for remote access to our corporate VPN.
Its from Verizon and Its called NATIONAL BROADBAND Access. Its $80.00/mnth (just like yours) and offers me very portable Dial up speed access. It uses technology called EVDO-1x and CDMA
2004-07-28 19:17:44 EST: 706 / 351
Your download speed : 723821 bps, or 706 kbps.
A 88.3 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 359969 bps, or 351 kbps.
Not too shabby for a truely portable i-net connection... and no... nothing is filtered. (You can even buy a static ip)
-Michael
I don't believe in sigs.
Smack dab between Portland and Eagle. Believe me, I have no options. Now that I think about it, I could probably get ISDN, but that's more expesnive than Satilite for even less.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
You might consider getting ISDN. It is another alternative that people forget about. 128kb/sec max speed but still fully functional when running.
This is an excellent idea.
Our T1 at the office costs us just a shade over $500 a month. Divided between 8 to 12 users, that wouldn't be too outrageous. I have more users than that on this T1, plus the office phone system (quite busy) is VOIP, and have never once felt the need for more bandwidth.
Add in some high end WiFi gear and a tall pole, and things just might work out.
I've been very happy with the service. For some reason, I have better luck getting a signal with the card than the phone (Verizon too), although it could be that a voice connection makes it easy to detect a drop out, versus the internet connection just slowing down. It rarely hits top speed, but the worst successful connection I've had is still faster than dialup.
If you can get EVDO then I'd say go for it. I've used EVDO many times on my boss's laptop (testing it of course), and I would get about 512kbit/s down and 120kbit/s up. Not too bad for cellular access. If you cant get EVDO (and all they offer is 1xRTT or EDGE) then dont bother, its not worth the $80/mo. Wireless latency, while it isnt as bad as going out to a satellite 23,000 miles up in geo. orbit, is still enough to keep you from playing CS. Maybe you could play RTS games like Starcraft, but not FPS.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
we have about 5 of the sprint pcmcia cards in our company, and the employees fight over them, so I think that says they like them.
i'm using one of them now on vacation in missouri. 35 mi. outside st. louis. 4 out of 5 bars. 240-270kbps. 400ms avg. to yahoo.
can you see me killing that troll now? good!
-Tony
I've got Sprint PCS "Vision", their 2.5G wireless Internet service to my Treo600 smartphone. It's CDMA 1xRTT, which promises symmetrical speeds up to 140Kbps. I have tested it to actually achieve up to 120Kbps, but that is averaged over a long window, like 30 seconds. Typical maximum speeds are more like 80Kbps over 30s. But it's very bursty. That 80Kbps over 30s seems to be about 110Kbps for about 20s, with about 10s of completely stalled connection scattered in chunks throughout the time. And that's the maximum: the "average" (unscientific sampling, but pretty typical several times a month, over a year) is more like 50Kbps over 30s, with 90Kbps bursts for 15s and 0Kbps for 15s, and occasional bursts up to 100Kbps.
The device has a few MB available for buffers, which could be useful in averaging all that out to 60-110Kbps over a couple minute buffer window. But the Treo OS doesn't multitask/thread, so the apps don't really handle buffering very smoothly. Depending on the DSP in the card, it might be better on a PC.
In real terms, that means it's not quite there for streaming audio (128Kbps is really the minimum, especially with the Treo's hifi stereo DAC and neat stream players). And of course VoIP is out, with the bursts and latency. Downloading/installing software is fine. Surfing the Web suffers from the small 160x160pxl screen, but can be maddening waiting for an info page blocked on a useless, but formatting-necessary image.
But it's all a dry run for EV-DO. That's Sprint's new 3G system, which apparently does deliver 140Kbps-1.5Mbps in published field trials (in real cities). No word on the latency, or burstiness. But any 140Kbps CIR will suffice for 128Kbps MP3 streams, which also covers VoIP (unless too latent). I haven't upgraded to a better Treo650, because a subsequent EV-DO phone will be the real jump to useability. I'd wait to get a card on that basis, too.
However, the real problem with Sprint is that they cheap out on their DSP servers on their wired network. I can hear audio filters drop to fewer taps as as traffic increases in voicecalls. And I expect it's even worse on their compressing proxy servers for "raw" Internet connections. Those servers just fail entirely, claiming "service unavailable", about 5-10% of the time. Sprint has always oversold their network to subscribers, then stiffed us with overtaxed equipment. I won't be surprised if their EV-DO rollout has some serious bottleneck that thwarts it, too.
--
make install -not war
Don't think it's been mentioned, a great resource for pretty much anything to do with cellular / device / carrier discussion is http://www.howardforums.com/
You could likely find someone in/near your area that's tried different provider's services.
Rob
Both Sprint and Verizon have money-back trial periods of a week or two. Why not take one for a test drive and see if it meets your needs?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I didn't expect to get the EVDO 6mb/sec bandwidth as it's not available in my area, but I was hoping for a more modest 80-100kb/sec which would be double or triple dialup (im lucky to get a 30k baud connect).
Verizon set me up with essentially a free wireless PCMCIA card after rebate, but since it was for home, I wanted to plug it into a USB pod on my home computer. I ran into several problems here, including the pins on the card being too big for the PCMCIA pod for some reason. Evert smart card Ive tried fits in it well, but not this. Eventually I got it to seat correctly and windows recognized it as a modem, but the Verizon software would not install correctly in this config.
So I then tried it in my laptop, figuring I'd have to have it or some other be my network hub. This installed OK and I got a signal, but it was very unreliable. I had bursts up to 160kb, but an equal number of periods with no connection. I only had about a 58% signal so perhaps I was bouncing between sites or something.
I sadly had to return it (Verizon gives 14 days to return no questions asked) before I was locked into the 2 year contract. I could have spent another couple hundred for an external yagi antenna and adapter for the card (these are available online) but I didn't want to spend the money to buy and install this, keep a laptop on my home net at all times, and commit to a 1 or 2 yr contract.
So I can't say it worked for me. But it may be worth trying. If you can get a better signal you may have a better chance.
Best of Luck!
I added it to my plan about 2 months ago, so if they've discontinued it, it's been very recently.
I was with Verizon for a long time due to their excellent coverage, but my lust for a Treo 650 finally got the better of me, and Sprint charges me less for 400 voice minutes plus unlimited data than Verizon wanted for JUST the data.
When I heard about the $5.00 no roaming option, I switched to Sprint the same day.
I have the Verizon EVDO card and in Dallas, and other cities with the 1xEVDO service it's pretty good. Speeds average 300 to 400 kbps with bursts up to 1 mbps or more. Works great under Linux too!
Latency is a problem though. I'm seeing 150 ms (or higher) average latencies on the first hop.
I've talked to several CDMA engineers who said there's nothing inherent to CDMA that would account for that high of a latency. Each (independently) said it must be how Verizon has configured their IP network.
I think Verizon engineered a high latency so VoIP wouldn't work. Why sell $75/month unlimited use service then allow people to make VoIP calls when there's so much money to be made selling metered voice minutes?
The down side is if you're not in a high speed coverage area, you get the slower dial up type speeds or nothing at all. It's definately not something I'd expect to work in rural areas.
I have service through a company called clearwire which is wireless at about DSL speeds. It was also $10/month cheaper than roadrunner
Hey, where's the confirm I'm not a script box?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
There are plenty of nay-sayers. I say, try it (and get one of the providers to offer you a trial on the hardware). If it doesn't work to your satisfaction, then perhaps you could get a bunch of your boon-loving neighbors together and work out a muni-wifi internet service.
Grab a T1 on a high spot and beam everyone a m0n0wall traffic-shaped WiFi connection. If you can get a few people together, the cost could be reasonable. You might even be able to talk the "village" into a muni-wifi effort and then beam yourself a signal in return for your "free of charge" services.
More
I have the verizon broadband wireless service through my work. It is great, I am on it now. I very rarely get "NationalAccess" which is a download of about 15KB/s. I almost exclusively get on the Broadband access and its 60-120KB/s download speeds.
The connection will go "dormant" if you dont load a page with IE, for some reason it doesnt recognize firefox as using the connection. I also have the 5220 card working with fc3 and centos4 successfully.
The latencies are often around 160ms, but its responsive enough for ssh or TS access. I have been very pleased with the service around Philadelphia and I have used it in DC successfuly also.
Regardless of what you're gonna get for a wireless connection (unless you're sitting enxt to a fat cable or DSL pipe with wirelsss router hooked up) you're going to always suffer from lag, bad service, etc.
Think about it. From my connection, I go from hub to DSL, to server, then out to wherever I need to go.
You do the same with a cell phone, it's gotta go from computer to cell phone. From cell phone to nearest available tower, from tower to whatever transmitter they use (and odds are, it's a satellite) from that Satellite back to a relay on land, out to your destination. Let's not forget about that return trip, now.
Also, last I recalled, cell phone networks with internet access are similar to cable modems - it's shared bandwidth. So the more people either making a call, or using their cell phone on the net, you're going to suffer just that much more.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
At work, we were sent some Merlin UMTS cards to test. It turns out we aren't in a UMTS coverage area and the cards are usless, because it also turns out the cards they sent are UMTS only. It would have been nice if the cards that they sent were also GPRS capable. I guess the same would go eith EVDO. Make sure the card can step down to 1xRTT if you travel outside the EVDO coverage area. On the plus side, you can pop the SIM out of the UMTS card and put it in a GSM phone and make calls on it. That's something to consider as well.
Another issue that hass not been mentioned is good old ISDN. Great latency and if he has a phone line he can probably get it. The bandwidth is on par with these mobile solutions and blows away his old dial-up speeds.
>Work out an agreement with them and then have them setup a line-of-sight wireless (wifi) link to your place.
Err, how practical is this? Sure its possible, but if the AP is a couple miles away youre going to have to pay for some professional radio people to point these things at each other. I see this suggestion all the time and I doubt anyone can just do it. Considering the FCC limitations on ISM band he cant just set up two towers, but haveto build a very, very tight line-of-sight channel which I'm assuming requires some significant radio experience to pull off. A mile is a long way away, and if he's too far for DSL we're talking multi-miles here.
here's the deal, and I know because I sell it, and I've used it. Get sprint, go to futuredial.com and make sure internet dialer is supported on the phone you want (most all samsungs Including the usually free VI-660, and most sanyo's). The upstream is usually about 110 the downstream about 118. The coverage only works on the sprint network so don't get the america coverage if your only using this phone for the internet. Make sure you get vision services, and then you don't need to pay the 79.99, in order to get it (currently sprint doesn't charge for it if you have vision on a basic plan). your latency is painful at times and sometimes images take a long time to download because of it. The best thing, you have 14 days to trial it. so just do it, sign the contract, if it doesn't work, take it back before then. get ahold of me if you want more info. P.S. pppd works perfectly well with it in linux. I've got some scripts for dialing if you want them. I just found them using google.
Sprint is not TDMA Sprint is CDMA, same as Verizon. CDMA is inherently more efficient at using the frequency bands and it is, from an engineering standpoint a superior technology. GSM is a TDMA type technology, Cignular uses GSM.
And my mum's house is over 665,280,000 inches away from mine.
Wiith GPRS or EDGE service it combines multiple radio channels and Time Slots to give you higher data rates.
It's worth mentioning that this is exactly the reason why the carriers frown on using your phone as a modem for your laptop. Checking a few e-mails on a minuscule cell phone screen doesn't tie those extra channels up for very long, but once you connect it to a computer for some "real" 'net activity, you're tying up some resources...
This is why the "unlimited" data plans for, say, a Treo are so much less than those for the PC cards.
Geeze... It always amazes me that people choose to live in remote-isolated areas and then expect someone in the business of making money to hand out nearly free service at a loss... In Alaska we'll pay as much as $100/month for a meg of bandwidth - not dirt cheap but then again, we chose to live here. LECs and CLECs cannot just give away business... They have to pay for the usage rights, cable plant, etc... If you want cheaper 'net access, move to the city - but then again, you'll pay more for real estate, property taxes, etc... It'll come out one way or the other.
I live in the woods also, and suffer along at 26.4 all of the time, which sucks big rocks.... I am relatively close to town, but for a while we had Monet network in town, before they went belly up, and with a madified direct-tv dish, aluminum foil, and a ramped up anteanea on the reciever we were able to get a consistant 150kb/s down from them. when you go from 2.5 kb/s to 150, it is a HUGE jump, and I miss them dearly.
The equipment exists, and it works, well, this service was running off of the cellular signals at 1.9 ghz or so from the local sprint towers and I loved it!
The other nice thing is that they used a card that was pcmcia style so you could use it in town when you were on your laptop and do irresponsible things like surfing porn on the freeway (now that's distracting).
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Woosh in NZ is basicly a 3G cellular service without the voice applications. The general opinion is that the latency is crap there.
From Woosh's own testmonial's page:
Latency is not an issue as our kids aren't gaming
I haven't used it myself, but if latency is your biggest problem with your sat service, then I wouldn't bother going to cellular.
ummm, hi res0?
Any hoo. Futuredial is the site you want to take a look at.
There, you will find a comprehensive listing of phones available for internet connectivity and the appropriately matched cable for your phone enabling you to do such a thing.
yes WiMax will have a much lower latency than a satellite. The lack of a round trip to geosyc does wonders.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I have also been looking for rural high speed internet access and WiMax is not here yet. I have been looking at a company www.wildblue.com. They have what appears to be a new spot beam satellite based internet and from what I have read has less latency than directway. I got an email from them that the service is going to be available via my rural electric coop and will be billed on the electric bill. Check the web site for prices. Hope this helps.
I'm with mesa networks in colorado and get a connection that is easily as fast as cable. 2.5Mb down/1Mbit up, for about $2 more than comcast want for their crappy service.
The best part is that I opened a support ticket to have reverse dns set up for my static ip, and it was dealt with in under an hour.
Feel free to ping me at graha dot ms at graha dot ms if you want more info
Can you get IDSL in your area? I have it here in the middle of nowhere TN, and it gives you 144 kbits speed with 100-150ms ping times.
It's not as fast as cable or adsl, but it might be a way to go. You *should* be able to get IDSL at 27,000feet, sometimes as much as 40,000.
Last summer I borrowed a wireless CDMA card from my buddy and used it successfully on Block Island. We had a clear view of the cell tower half a mile away. I mated my wife's computer to mine with a crossover cable, and we both had great speed.
In February I ordered my own card, and tried to use it at customer sites in the Greater Hartford area (self-reliance). Not in the boonies, just in Manchester, CT and other densely populated suburbs. Unless you can see a cell tower from where you sit, forget it. At home I have four bars, and no cellular broadband. The card went back to Verizon.
Verizon Offers a EVDO which is 'claimed' to be 2.4Megabit, reality is you're downstream is 700-300k if you're in a good area. Otherwise you're stuck with National Access, which is 114k downstream. Note, it's 114k upstream on EVDO anywho. Same with Sprint, nothing new there. Problem is the CDMA cards, don't like Wifi onboard. Centrino Chipsets and Wifi Chipsets tend to mess with them badly. GSM cards, are ALOT slower. I do mean ALOT slower. They start at 56k and go barely up. You might be able to get a 300k connection with GSM, little higher. But generally Wireless Providers don't want you to use them like Broadband connections, and even viewing Streaming Media is generally against their TOS. Plus you're paying 80$ wether you can use it or not. Coverage isn't that great really, and for the most part it's just not that great. If you're needing internet access in an Airport, or on the run in alot of big city's. Great you can use it, otherwise it's really not that great. There was an article on STOMPBOX earlier with a Verizon Card, he touched on some of the weakness's. It drops alot. The connection goes 'dormant' and while you're still connected it's a dead connection. So you basically have to run ping constantly in order to not loose the connection. If you are serious, check out http://www.evdoinfo.com/
Cheers and good luck. Have you looked at moving closer to the "Big City" ?? Might be a better option....
Peace Out
This can work out cheaper. Take Cingular phones for example, you can use a data or bluetooth cable and use the data services built into the phone.
For example, adding unlimited data to a cell phone plan on cingular is an extra $20 or so on top of the existing stuff, while an unlimited data card plan is $80 or so. The information is "out there" if you know what to search for.
And secondly, you can usually do a trial link with the phone and see if the data rates are suitable before getting a data card. If you can manage that, you'll find out pretty quickly if you're wasting your time or not.
I myself use bluetooth or a data cable to talk to my Cingular/Motorola V551 when in need of an on-the-spot connection. Throughput isn't bad, but latency can be a bit brutal. The data cable option seems faster/more reliable to me.
I live right outside of Boston. I travel all over the US, and sometimes to Asia and Europe. I have a Verizon xv6600 phone and an HP / Compaq NC6000 laptop (both with Bluetooth.)
In the greater Boston area I get very close to DSL / cable modem download speeds. Upload speeds are lower, but still reasonable. My VPN connection and normal web browsing work just fine. I'm not a big gamer, so I can't comment game performance.
LA and New York city are about the same as Boston. In Albany NY, it's like a 33.6 modem at best. Same with San Fran. Latency and timeouts also seem much worse in these areas.
Outside of the US, I rarely get any connection at all.
I guess what I'm getting at is that it all depends on where you live and what kind of signal you have. Maybe if you live in a "fringe" area, you can get a n external antenna to help out.
From the links you posted:
Average download speeds of 100 to 130 kbps. It doesn't look like DSL speed to me.
I use mine to download movie previews and listen to streaming audio all the time (assuming that I'm in an EVDO area.) I've never had a problem with Verizon shutting me down.
If you're good with electronics, you could hook up a laser bridge between your place and a neighbouring farm or a farm that is close enough to a DSL repeater and share the cost of internet/hydro with the farm owner. IIRC make magazine had an article on laser uplinks, but like every other issue google's your friend.
(If this doesn't help, just place a big shark with a friggin' laser beam on the ISP's CEO's lawn. Maybe he'll get the clue, but don't count on that
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
http://wildblue.com/
Looks more promising than DirecWAY at least...
For most of last year, I used my Sony Ericsson T610 via a Bluetooth connection for remote Internet access. The service was a cheap add-on ($19/month for unlimited use), but real slow. The 610 didn't support the highest-speed modes that Cingular had available at the time, and I've heard it said that they're pretty slow with their high-speed rollout.
Back in November, I switched to the Verizon service with the PC5220 card. Mac OS X supports it natively with no extra software - I just had to input my phone number settings and it worked. For the first two months I settled for the slower 1xRTT service, which seemed to me to be about twice what I could get with dialup and was still better than what Cingular had been giving me. At the beginning of January, Verizon turned on EV/DO in the Boston area, which has generally been an excellent performer. Most everywhere I travel routinely for work is EV/DO enabled, and the card automatically uses it when it has a signal, otherwise it falls back to 1xRTT.
Service for the data-only cards is $80/month for unlimited use. No, you can't run servers with it, but you wouldn't want to. It's a real good option otherwise for a laptop user.
I have a client using the service with the Audiovox PocketPC phones - they love the always-on sync and the capabilities of the device, but they hate the phone itself and are switching to standalone phones for voice (they have two of the PocketPCs now).
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Oops, correction...
That $500/month covers the T1, plus the DSL service at my house and the DSL at the owner's house.
Do you have the option of wireless internet access in your area? I don't mean wireless phone, I mean a 30' antenna attached to your house. The speeds are generally better than DSL. They are offering this in rural OK for ~$60/month (+$150 for installation and equipment), but only if you ask for it and only if you can't get anything else.
and dialup speeds top out at 17,700baud on a good day.
Don't forget folks, baud and bps are not always interchangeable. In the old days when a single electrical change accounted for the communication of a single bit, you could use baud and bps interchangably. But in these modern times where a single electrical change can represent a communication of more than one bit, they are seperate.
56k MODEM's are still 2400 baud for example.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Receiving calls is free, most other places. Only know of US where you pay if you get a call.
Cell radio may not provide much bandwidth, but latency certainly wouldn't be an issue. Do you notice a delay when you talk on your cell phone?
Talk to these guys www.on-sight.net or these guys www.c-it.net about setting up sat. inet in your are and get your neighbors to sign on to a 802.11 network and your set
I've heard that actual broadband speeds should be possible with latest-generation phones
And just like satellite, you have high latency. Sprint Vision will give you ping times that skip from 400ms to over 1000ms. Currently, there are no providers offering low latency broadband over cellular that I know of. I remember reading about a trial for a very small area that was supposed to begin soon somwhere in North Carolina I think, but as I recall, it would involve a forklift upgrade to get nationwide coverage.
For years to come, broadband over cellular will not be low latency for rural areas. Those are usually the last to get upgraded towers. Naturally, infrastructure upgrades happen where the customers are first.
Check out Cingular's EDGE. If you can take full advantage of EDGE, you will be able to comfortably surf the web at the speeds you expect of broadband... at leas that's my experience.
You're logged in, and your karma is high-enough to prove that you're probably not a script posting stupid shit ;)
Where you mount an antenna on your roof pointed at a particular location. You can get multiple megabits from this, and cheaper than from a cell-phone provider. Here's an example. http://www.sonic.net/sales/broadband/broadlink/ind ex.shtml You can't use them unless you're in Santa Rosa, but there may be companies in your area. Basically go to dslreports.com and check for wireless DSL.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/search
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I use this 3G PCMCIA card which plug ins in any laptop and works just like a modem (with AT commands). It connects to the cellular network, either in UMTS/3G/CDMA mode (384kbit) or in GPRS mode (45kbit). It can switch between 3G and GPRS dynamically on-the-fly. I even post to my blog using a laptop when I am on the bus! It's a really awesome product and service and it costs 30 Euro per month, with 40MB monthly usage (extra MBs cost more). It's great for reading slashdot while you are on the bus or outside in cafes and parks. And yes, it even works on GNU/Linux!
How would you get there in the first place?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You can't use your data connection with "server devices"? Isn't that pretty much everything?
Hi guys,
I've been using wireless internet on my cell phone for years because I'm too cheap to pay what I think is an obscene amount for broadband.
The performance, in my experience is highly variable, primarily based on the congestion of where you are connecting from and the quality of the phone or card.
I've set up a friend of mine on the $80 AYCE plan and he enjoys it a great deal, although the latency is pretty bad regardless of what incarnation of the verizon technology you use.
For detailed information and a community which specializes in this sort of thing, please check out
http://www.howardforums.com/
That is where I learned everything I know about wireless internet, in particular about Verizon's service
FYI, the max speeds I've obtained are around 16k/second (i.e. ~120-130 kps) with latency of, at best, 300 ms. The 16k/second speeds I've obtained are typical in low congestion areas or at low congestion times and they are sustained speeds, not just a spike.
I hope I've been of assistance
I had the Sprint PCS data service with the Aircard 550. It was 50k - 70k second and it had ridiculous latency issues. I dropped the $80/mo cost, got a Samsung i500 cell phone/PDA, and using it as a CDMA modem is nearly as fast and the latency is much better.
I got an external antenna and pigtail for my aircard but I never used 'em - too disgusted with the service to sink the time into making that stuff go. If you find one you like you can add a small tower, external antenna, etc, and pump up your service at home.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
There are currently 3548 active users on http://www.howardforums.com/ "Your Mobile Phone Community & Resource." The forums are massive...Everything from provider to area is there so check it out.
Sprint's Vision plan is unlimited internet for $15 in addition to your regular service plan. You can buy a USB cable and download software from http://www.3gcables.com I used this setup to get online after Hurricane Isabel as the phone lines were down. I have very poor reception where I am and still averaged about a 250k connection. I had a lesser computer then and didn't try any games with it though so I don't know about latency issues.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
i have reach dslfrom paradyne at 33,000 ft
In many cases, this is because of regulatory reasons, and not technical/logistical ones. Cellular providers can move more quickly than a bureaucratically-entrenched state-monopoly PTT.
You will be amazed how fast a Citrix or Termial Server session ( RDP ) can be over a slow connection. Since only the keystrokes and monitor data are transmitted.
I use verizon's NationalAccess as my sole internet connection. Basicly I use my cellphone as a wireless modem connected to my laptop. I'm in a well covered area, so I've never had any signal problems, though this could obviously differ from city to city. To avoid using all the airtime in my service plan, I only connect after nine o'clock and on weekends - which sucks, but it's better than paying the extra $70+ for unlimited access.
Why do people keep quoting the price of t1's. They are based on:
1) Tarriffs between IXC'S/ILEC'S/CLEC'S and so on
2) Its also based on distance from the CO
Gheeez people, this info is pointless unless you specifiy a:
1) Location
2) Telco
3) Type of service / plan
4) FCC vs PUC. Yes you can get a PUC t1 and not pay the higher FCC charges.
Now damn... Post some decent info.
1xRTT has a peak throughput of 144 kbits/sec. Realistically you'll only get 60-80 kbits.
1xEV-DO has a peak throughput of a bit over a megabit. You'll see about half that or less realistically. EV-DO is only available in a handful of metropolitan areas right now.
Also, both EV-DO and RTT have very high latency. I recently talked to someone very familiar with the technology (works for a company that's developing what is basically 4G wireless), and apparently EV-DO has 300-400 ms latency.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Look for a wireless internet provider in your area. You didn't mention where exactly you live. I work for a WISP and we offer 1.5Mb+ to rural areas.
You can't take the sky from me
You should try AerialLink. They have several fixed wireless plans that are competitively priced. The speeds can be phenomenal as well. I've set up a few clients with the service, and it's been great. You do have to worry about signal degradation, so if you're in a heavily wooded area this might not be an option, but if you're not, you should check them out.
Cingular mostly still uses TDMA, as does AT&T. Both are in the process of migrating to GSM, but coverage is not available everywhere yet. Sprint/Verizon are CDMA only. The only GSM-only carrier is T-Mobile. T-Mobile has the best data service (at least in Florida, AT&T/Cingular/Sprint/Verizon are only about the speed of dial-up), but has horrible coverage. If you're more than 20 miles from an interstate, don't expect coverage. Make a point to try before you commit to a contract, since some of the contracts (especially Verizon) are nearly impossible to get out of, even if the service doesn't work.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I support that.
Even though I have both ADSL and cable for "real" networking, I haven't given up my ISDN line because it's so versatile for CTI and so reliable as a data carrier with 64kbps x 2, which you can aggregate into 128kbps.
And there is effectively no contention with ISDN, you get every last bps that you pay for. And it has no mobile-type latency either --- I used the ISDN line for years for playing non-broadband MMOGs like EQ and AO, very succcessfully.
I'll be able to answer you tomorrow. I just got a new EDGE-enabled T-Mobile phone, but I get a crappy signal at home (true with all providers,) so I won't be able to test it until I'm on the road tomorrow. (From what I hear, T-Mobile still isn't EDGE, but at least the phone is for when T-Mobile gets their act together.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
You may have cell coverage in your area, but not high speed cell coverage. The cellular phone companies have several networks in co-existance. There is the old digital voice network, which covers pretty much the entire USA. The newer fast data networks are mostly covering only urban and dense suburban areas right now. I would seriously doubt that you would be in a high speed area with so low a population not even Cable TV is around. Now, these cell modem cards can work on the old network, but their speed is going to make your 17,700 baud modem seem like a dedicated T1 line. Also, even if you were in a coverage area, cellular modems are rediculously expensive. Besides the $200 for the modem, you need a basic service plan ($50 a month) plus an unlimited data package (another $50 a month).
I use a 5220 PC card (Verizon Wireless) at my remote location, where I'm in a similar predicament - DSL is unavailable, and dialup is horrible at best. Being that I'm in a remote area, I find that I am consistently at the top end of their speed chart - that is, FTP transactions are running consistently at 130-144k. Web browsing is laggy, but not impossibly bad. When I travel to Pittsburgh, my service is FAST, as in ISOs coming down the line FASTER than my home DSL (through Verizon, ironically).
Verizon Wireless currently has two technologies, as another poster said. 1xRTT (aka "National Access") gives you peak speeds of 144k, with "average throughput" around 60-80k. 1xEVDO (aka "Broadband Access") peaks out at just over 2mb, with "average throughput" at 400-700k. If you're confused by the whole "kilobyte/kilobit" thing, an FTP file coming in on a 144k connection will show at around 14-15k in your FTP client (a 56k modem = 5-6k, 1.5m DSL = 140-160k). I have not run into any trouble with their TOS (running BitTorrent or p2p apps, for example). After speaking with some field data reps, I've found that their main concern is that their cells aren't overwhelmed. If you're hosting webcams and sucking bandwidth from everyone else, you're gone. On the other hand, if you're in a remote or low-usage area, then go for the gold.
I've also had extensive data experience with T-Mobile. In short, I hated it. On the best days, GPRS was only comparable to dialup - not better, and sometimes actually worse. The only thing T-Mobile had going for them was the price - $29/mo unlimited.
I can't speak for Cingular's EDGE or Sprint's Vision service. My understanding is that Cingular and T-Mobile are moving to UMTS (someone correct me if I'm wrong) within the next two years, which peaks out at 1.5mb/s (ditto). Right now I'd stay away if data is your prime concern, largely because of speed and coverage issues (YMMV, but what good is it if it doesn't work in your house?).
Lastly, I haven't heard ANY major carrier advertise "DSL speed over the air!" other than Verizon. And truthfully, EVDO is damn close.
Take advantage of each carrier's return policy, if you have the time, and see which one works the best for you. I'm a Verizon fan, but some people might find their $59/mo data service a bit much.
Thinking outside the box: Have you considered moving to someplace that doesn't suck?
Just making sure.
You forgot that the WiFi part is unregulated. Someone puts up something that interferes. Well too bad.
He'd be better getting his Ham license, and then see what wireless solution he can come up with.
For about $20, I was able to get a USB Cable for my LG VX6000 which I use on Verizon. With that, I can get about 140Kbps on the 1x network. I just pay my regular flat rate and my extra $5/month (iirc) for the "unlimited web".
Being in the boonies, you might not be able to get the 1x network service. On the LG VX6000, you can tell by looking for the "1x" service icon that apperas whenever the 1x service is available.
The drawback to this, of course, is that your phone is your "modem", and must be connected to your computer during the Internet session; and you will not receive phone calls during your Internet session. So it's okay for periodic use, but may not be suitable for an always-on Internet.
In my uses, I was able to use SSH, SMTP, POP, HTTP/HTTPS, and AIM. So for my needs, it was effectively unfiltered. One thing that was annoying was the auto-idle-hangup that would kick in from time to time.
Also, for web-surfing, there is an accelerator software that you can run that would compress images at a (user selectable) higher compression to speed download times of web pages.
That said, are you sure you are so far off in the boonies that you can't find a wireless ISP? A good WiFi transceiver with the right antenna could easily give you 1 or 2 Mbps over many many miles...
If you saw "DSL speeds" in an ad, it was most likely (at least I hope) for Verizon's BroadbandAccess service, which is based on CDMA EV-DO technology. The other carriers offer service based on very different technologies that are - at the moment - dramatically slower.
You can expect roughly "dialup" (~ 40-100 Kbps) speeds with all of the other carriers. Only Verizon can offer you anything close to DSL speeds at the moment.
That will change in a couple of months when Sprint launches the same EV-DO technology as Verizon. Then a couple of months later, Cingular will launch their high-speed network, based on WCDMA/HSDPA technology.
When Sprint and Cingular launch, hopefully we will see some price competition, so now might not be the best time to buy, if you can hold out.
All of these services, by the way, only work in select metro areas. No wireless carrier has high-speed data available throughout their whole coverage area yet (not even close).
I had it for a year. It's not bad.
I did not work in some small towns but was fast in the big cities.
I'd test it in your area before you use it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'll look into it.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
While I can't prove it conclusively without having a way to go back I think the upgrade to the R4B9 firmware is what is making this card so unreliable.
Sony Ericsson flat out refuses to send me the old firmware. [Their updater just updates as soon as you double click and doesn't give any option to save the old firmware.] Cingular refers you to Ericsson.
At any rate if you have a GC83 and your using linux I seriously recommend thinking twice before upgraded your firmware. There is no going back and you may regret it. Well I certainly do.
Here shows someone elses experience with that firmware on a GC82.
http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/programming/
He apparently has copies of the old firmware for GC82's there, but I rather suspect it would be a bad move to try them on a GC83. Of course you use any file you find randomly on the internet at your own risk...
If anyone has a copy of R3B9 for GC83 or even one of the older firmwares and wants to provide a link I'd be very grateful. More importantly, I'd like to know if the firmware can be downgraded sucessfully without causing problems.
No distance limits on those.
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Just go to the source:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/mspeed?results=1
Latency and actual throughput are all there, ranked by provider. VZW and Spring are leading the pack.
Take a look at http://www.broadbandreports.com/mspeed?domains=1 for a more averaged result.
...all the republicans.
Worse, all the republicans who think $60/mo. is a lot of money.
I think using cellphones for Internet access is not exactly a great idea, given the relatively low data transfer rates (150 kbps download speeds max) and latency issues.
The ultimate solution will come with the rollout of WiMax 802.16/802.20 long-range wireless networking in 2006. Unlike WiFi 802.11 variants, WiMax can handle thousands of users per antenna array up to line of sight, which means installing a relatively small number of WiMax antenna arrays to cover a whole metropolitan area. It also means that broadband access is now available in many rural areas not within reach of cable or xDSL lines.
It is not that bad (usally a bit faster than dialup, but a pain in the ass ping time). It still is good for the convinience. The ping time is slow when using ssh or telnet.
If you have sprint, you can also connect your laptop to your treo using PDA Net.
Fight Spammers!
So I have both a Sprint Wireless card for their 3 1/2G CDMA network and a wireless card for Verizon's 3G CDMA network.
b roadband/index.jsp
Sprint's network offers a MAXIMUM of about 150Kbit / Sec downloads so about 3x of a 56 modem, upstream you'll get 50Kbit / Sec if you're lucky. Latency is at BEST about 300msec. It's ok for surfing if you're in a bind but is painful if you have to do any telnet / ssh stuff. Remember these are the best numbers you're going to see if you're on a congested circut or get bad reception good luck.
Verizon's 3G network is great if you get on their newer broadband access network. This newer network offers 900Kbit / Sec downloads (yes I have gotten this it's amazing) and about 100Kbit sec downloads, latency is more like 200Msec and is very usable for system admin even over a VPN. HOWEVER this is only available in a few places in the US for a list see:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobileoptions/
If you're in a rural area I can almost guarantee you that you won't be on Verizon's newer network. However there are exceptions, Verizon lists access to their Broadband network in Kansas City, MO but I know it also works well in Overland Park, KA.
Basically I'd think that you'd be better off with some sattelite based service unless you happen to be near a big city.
Duh! Programmer access.
How we know is more important than what we know.
In addition, their new (VCast Capable) phones will support the service as opposed to the existing ones which drop to c.14,4kbps.
...now hand me the Verizon pom-poms so I can do the happy-customer dance ;)
I'm waiting for the new Motorola - for more info see www.howardforums.com.
So not only will you get high speed connecticvity in supported areas (1mpbs+), you can connect your pc, pda or more importantly, laptop to your cell by bluetooth!
The phone also supports mp3 playing via SD card, plus has an onboard camera (1.3mp) etc so I'm ditching my mp3 player and old digicam as well...
Wireless services (for phone, network, etc) and even local or co-gen electric service is popular for another, simpler reason also: People will dig up copper wire and steal it to sell. Wireless kind of prevents that from happening.
Actually no, I'm logged in etc, and have the same karma as I did yesterday.
Yet today I haven't seen a single box requesting I confirm that I'm not a robot.
I made about 10 posts yesterday and every one had the indecipherable script thingy waiting..
... move. Join the rest of civilization, and stop taking up so much space.
887321 = 337*2633
The claim is 'wireless online surfing as fast as DSL'.
Unlike the wires to your home for DSL, you share the cellular airwaves with lots of other users. While it may be true that the peak data rates provided on a cellular channel are in the order of DSL, an individual user is usually limited to a small fraction of that.
Anybody want a peanut?
I don't know if the product is commercial yet, but a quick google brings up another possibility -- Symmetricon has a GoLong product which allows extending DSL up to 30,000 feet using mid-loop amplifiers.
They estimate it at $500-700 per customer.
Given the comments, it seems that cellular service may only a be a marginal improvement over a standard modem connection. If you have a buddy who lives within range of DSL service, could you set up a line-of-site directional 802.11b connection over the 4 to 6 miles required to get within range of DSL service?
it's twitch games you play online. otherwise most mmog type games and others that don't require sub 100ms latency play reasonably well.
i've used satellite before and sometimes, given the right conditions it could even match cable/dsl. well it was that way when i first got it... then it degraded into hell and i finally had to give up my twitch games.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Well, with 4096-QAM, you'd still have around 9MBps, which is more than enough in my book ;-)
No, seriously: there's a difference between "baud" and "bps": baud is the number of different modulation states per second on the line, while bps is the effectively transmitted number of bits per second.
I just wanted to clarify this.
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
Over here in New Zealand, I guess most of our road maintenance contractors don't know how much copper's worth, so they don't steal it. Doesn't stop 'em from ripping it up, but they still leave it right there.
Over the last couple of years a number of small companies have started to offer fixed wireless solutions to consumers outside of the service areas of cable and dsl. They are quite reliable and with speeds around 1Mbit/sec. This companies tend to be quite localized so you will have to do your own research to find out if there is a company in your area.
A couple of links:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/dslalt
http://www.efirehose.net/ (this link is specific to the Calgary area)
It says you can't host it (or serve it up live). Not that you can't download it. Big difference.
WildBlue (www.wildblue.com) is a new sat. service starting in June 2005. It offers service for $45/month and says that is works with VPN, although an IPSEC VPN suffers in performance due to the Sat. Latency.
I worked at Verizon as an intern a couple of years ago when this was first offered at a flat rate, and EVERYONE in my office (except for the underpaid interns, of course ;-) ) jumped on the bandwagon and got the service. I never used it personally, but I heard a lot of great things about it, and never really heard any complaints. Re: VPN - they all used VPN to connect to the company intranet and work from home and on the road, so I know this works at least. As for other services over this connection, I'm not really sure, but I'm assuming they work fine as well.
Disclaimer: I no longer work for Verizon, so I have no vested interest or official viewpoint on this product, and I never worked in or near the business unit that offers this product; any formal inquiries about the service should be directed to them. Cheers.
`which fortune`
I've had a Verizon 5220 card for just about a year now in South FL (work purchased it for me during the 2004 hurricanes for support). Runs about $80/mo. They have the EVDO service, speeds are about 600k-800k down/ 80k-120k up. Latency can be 150-300ms depending on where you are going. Service around here is routed through their network and comes out of a NAP in the Texas area which probably adds at least 30ms behind those times. VPN, and all other services worked, they didn't block any inbound services, I could RDP to my home laptop from the office if needed. I've had no problems staying connected for 30 hours straight, and have even transfered over 2.1 GB during a 8hr span a few times. It worked well with ICS when I changed between broadband providers. I've used it up and down the NE coast as well and have been really impressed. For those really hard core shoutcast listeners you can continously listed to a 96k stream no drops from here to Disney if needed it will auto drop down to RTT/144k and return once in range.
My mom is out in the boonies. She's been on Starband for a number of years, and has spent a ridiculous amount of money on equipment.... her cable modem has melted down twice.
This last time, it stopped working completely, even to the point of talking to the computer at all. So I called Starband. It took two hours on hold before I could talk to someone. This was actually two calls, because I called, waited an hour, and then the system hung up on me. The second call took another hour and I finally got rhrough to a technician. He said "oh, sorry, your service is provided by Dish Network, you'll have to talk to them."
So I called Dish, who answered within a few minutes... but they couldn't help me. "Sorry, you'll have to talk to Starband, we don't know anything about the hardware." I had him ask his supervisor and the supervisor confirmed it.. I had to talk to Starband.
So I called Starband back. It took about 90 minutes... they had the good grace to disconnect me after only 30 minutes of waiting on my first call, so I got started on my second hour a little sooner. I explained my problem to the guy with the strong Indian accent. He said "You have to talk to Dish about that." And I said "No, I can't, it's hardware and you guys have to do hardware." He said back, "You have to talk to Dish about that." And then he hung up on me.
And note that this is the SECOND $1000 modem she's bought from them. I'm not sure she paid the full $1k for the second, but it was still a lot, over $500 for eure.
Dish Network and Starband are THE WORST network providers I have EVER seen. You are better off with carrier pigeon protocol. DO NOT sign up with these people. They define customer hostility. Their network is atrocious and their customer service... well, see the above paragraph. This company deserves to be nuked from orbit. You've gotta realize... even when the net was WORKING, it was only for a very, very loose definition of working. Starband would be a perfect synonym on Wikipedia for 'incompetence'.
So I went back in and told my mother she was changing providers. We've had various misadventures before she found one she liked. She's in a fairly remote area, but has reasonable wireless coverage, so we figured we'd try setting her up that way. (she's about 1.25 hours NE out of Atlanta, Georgia.)
In that area, Verizon's service was terrible, nearly as bad as Starband's. My guess was that the cell network was okay, but that it was grossly underprovisioned at the cell tower(s). At 4AM I got pretty good download speeds. At 4pm the network was essentially unusable. It appears Verizon is willing to accept very, very poor levels of service quality while still happily signing people up. If you go with Verizon, MAKE SURE you have a money-back guarantee. Their network was no better than Starband's, and that's as profound a statement of dissatisfaction as I can make.
Next she tried Suncom, which is the local AT&T affiliate. Their service plan is very reasonable. It's almost exactly like a 56k modem, and quite reliable. You won't get your pages quickly, but you WILL get them, which is more than I can say for either Starband or Verizon. Suncom's pricing is very good too.. the minimum each month is $5, and the maximum is $50. So if you're not using it, you don't get soaked, and the most you can pay for any given month is $50. Suncom has very good, customer-oriented price plans, and if you're in the South, they're a good choice.
Unfortunately, my mother kept roaming into Cingular space, even though she was just sitting in her armchair in her living room. Suncom tried to bill her several hundred dollars for roaming, backed off on that, but told her she couldn't use it, in the future, when the network said Cingular. It was doing that more and more, so she just cancelled/returned that service and tried Cingular's flavor.
In her area, Cingular appears to be quite good. I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet, but she says i
Move
If you're in the coverage area. Study the maps of each of the providers that promise this. The maps are broken up basically into two parts for those "out in the boonies". The first map will the provider's cell coverage. An example is Verizon's extensive 98% coverage or some number up there. The second map is the digital coverage area where CDMA is covered. For the most part, if you live near the metropolitan areas, you should be ok and receive what is relative to 1MB nic transfer (workable). The downside is the coverage isn't everywhere and gets spotty around the edges. Study the maps carefully! Not to say there's not options, though. Some providers offer a secondary that connect thru the cell phone path's, but the speed is a whopping 14.4Kb and acts like it. Painful, but when you need that connection... $79 is about the going rate for just data unlimited, but you can package rates get a regular cell phone with an adapter connecting to the PC. I would warn here about the PDA phones battery life, though. Especially when the phone is not in "flight" mode and busy searching for signal to the CDMA network.
The geek shall inherit the earth.
Funny, I just researched this in April, and decided on Verizon. Depending on your area, Verizon 1XRTT or EVDO will usually work.
On EVDO I'm had real-world speeds routinely hit better than 300Kbps. A couple interesting things though. One, the service clearly does some sort of optimization for web access -- small files will hit the peak speeds, but the larger the file the slower the download rate. You can actually see this in real time if you used a download client that shows transfer rates -- starts off screaming about after about 50-100K bytes, it "decays" to about 150Kbps -- still way better than dialup or even the 2B ISDN line I've normally used.
The other is the usual warning about overused capacity; I definitely notice lower transfer rates at peak times of day -- but at 2AM I'll see better than 400 Kbps quite often.
Upload bandwidth is quite a bit smaller, around 40-60Kbps.
All of these figures are for EVDO. For the more widely available 1XRTT I've had about 40-60Kbps connections.
Anyway, I'd say it's great for web browsing, fine for email as long as there's no big attachments.
Verizon has a lot of scary language in their AUP, but there's some folks who frequent the EVDO message boards that have recorded insane levels of bandwidth use (like 20-30GB/mo) without a peep from verizon so far.
One negative: latency is horrible. In the wee morning hours I'll see ~ 150ms ping times to google; during busy times pings climb to 400+ ms, with an occasional martian at > 1000ms.
Can't get broadband? uhaul.com, dude.
This sig no verb.
I have a 3G card that I use for mobile internet access, and it's suprisingly fast (I can get up to 200kb/s sometimes). It's supposedly guaranteed at 384kb/s. GPRS seems subbstantially slow (like dial-up slow), and it kicks in when I can't get cellphone reception on the 3G card. Is that kind of service not available in the states?
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I recently switched from Sprint to Cingular to Verizon so I have some experience with all three. My only true data point is that in Albuquerque, NM I am able to get 120kbps using Verizon's 1X CDMA, and in Los Angeles I was able to get significantly faster (but I didn't benchmark it) using Verizon's EV-DO.
Here are some nominal numbers for the technology that's been around for the past few years:
Cingular GPRS: 32-48 kbps
Sprint 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Verizon 1X CDMA: 80-120 kbps
Of the newer crop of technologies that are coming out:
Cingular EDGE: 80-200 kbps
Sprint EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Verizon EV-DO: 400-700 kbps
Of course, "your mileage may vary"... Cingular's EDGE service is more accessible than the other "new technologies" at this point because it's a simpler technology that really just allows your wireless device to combine multiple channels at once for higher speeds. Make sure your wireless card supports EDGE and that EDGE is available in your area before going with Cingular. (Plus their customer service is awful, but that's another story...)
Sprint and Verizon's EV-DO technology is currently available in 30-40 major cities, which doesn't sound like it will help you any but it may get to your area eventually. In the mean time, their 1X CDMA gives you better than dialup, so if you can be happy with ~120 kbps, this might work for you.
Most cellular companies give you 15 days to cancel service without paying any penalties, so I'd ask about availability of EDGE and EV-DO in your area, then pick one and try it. (Or pick both and try them.) Run some broadband speed tests (http://www.dslreports.com/stest and others) at various times of day and see what kind of speeds you're getting. If it's too slow, return it and get your money back, though you'll probably lose your activation fee and have to pay a prorated monthly bill.
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller
Cellular == Wireless
Wireless != Cellular
Semantics, maybe, but I also live in an area with no DSL/Cablemodem and we've got a GREAT wireless infrastructure via 2 802.11b based ISPs. One has a T1, the other a 3Mb ATM link.
Overall my uptime is almost as good as with DSL. I probably average 2-3 hours a month downtime due to various issues, only some of which are because I'm on wireless instead of wired.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Your first mistake was listening to Papa Bell. They are experts at leaving out details. Likely, your coverage was in the cell phone network. This speed is ok in that it's connected, but not better than for small emails. The other coverage (that dsl speed) is the CDMA network and since getting Sprint/Cingular/Whatever-the-fuck-they've-become, and can deliver much faster rates. The problem is there are always two maps to look at (cell and data). They left this information for you in the fine print. You have to study the maps. Metro's hot, rural depends. The second is "truth in advertising". It _is_ as fast as DSL...the lowest bandwidth possible and still call it DSL. I agree with you about the rural areas being lost. With the satellelite or cable options, the telcos have been slowing even further reaching out to them. But the same reason you didn't just post one up on a tower for your boss...the cost of "starting your own service" requires much more administrative costs than just the hardware. In addition to the high real estate of a tower, not just anybody can climb a tower (legally) and it usually takes two or three expensive trips to get the range right. There's numerous other details I'm leaving out and I'm not saying it 'can't' be done, just that it's not so easy of an investment as it sounds AND getting the personnel in that small town that can understand it.
The geek shall inherit the earth.
Verizon gives you 15 days (I'm sure only because of some law).
The geek shall inherit the earth.
why don't you call them and ask them?
At the very heart of the Internet, the colo centers of Northern Virginia, the typical price for bandwidth is $200 per megabit per month based on consumption at the 95th percentile. El Cheapo links can cost as little as $100/meg while some folks pay MCI as much as $400/meg.
That's what the companies you buy from are paying for their bandwidth, so when they charge you $60/month for a mutli-megabit link (after agregation), you're getting a fair price.
Yes, it is true that in the same area Verizon is offering FiOS (http://www.verizon.net/fios/) at 15 megs down, 2 up for $50/month to selected residential customers. But you can't use the bleeding edge as your yardstick.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"As fast as DSL" Is probably a lie at best, but I'm guessing.
Regarding the dsl situation; Annoying as the cables are there, it's just that you don't have control of the exchange.
What is the actual technology used to make this happen? If it GPRS forget it. I've use GPRS regularly in the UK and it's slow and laggy. If I want to check the surf webcam that might take upto a minute.
If it's 3G or something like that I expect coverage is unlikely.
I note that satallite connections are also portable in theory, especially with a car.
A blog I run for the wealth
this is true, at least in the Philippines. Because of the snail-like pace of landline deployment, people have gone to wireless for their telephone needs.
A little trivia that is somewhat related to this thread:
In year 2000, the SMS traffic of the Philippines (a third world country) is bigger than the SMS usage of the entire Europe. I don't know if it's still the same now.
I have used all of the services and have written it up. Of course you need to find out which of the services actually works where you plan to use it.
Within the US, if you happen to be in one of Verizon's 32 or so "broadband access" service areas, then Verizon's $80 per month service is the way to go. 300-500k typical download speeds, bursting to 2M bits per second. Upload speeds 100-200k. This service is technically called "EVDO" and Verizon calls it "broadbandaccess". If you are elsewhere in the US the Verizon card will get you what is technically called "1X" speeds, namely 50-70k bps download speed, bursting to 144k. Verizon calls that "nationalaccess". Verizon has a good coverage map tool that will help you figure out whether you would get the fast or slow Verizon service depending on where you are. I previously used the Nextel and Sprint and AT&T Wireless and Cingular and T-Mobile services, and if you are in a broadbandaccess (EVDO) service area, the Verizon service is definitely the way to go.
Proceeding in descending order of speeds, the next speed level within the US is "Edge". The chief Edge provider in the US was formerly AT&T Wireless, now merged into Cingular. If you are in an Edge service area (see the Cingular maps) then you can sometimes get download speeds of 100-130k bps. In other areas Cingular will be able to provide GPRS speeds of maybe one-third of Edge speeds, or around 30-50k downloads.
The next step down is Sprint's 1X service, which is the same speed as Verizon's 1X service. You get 50-70k bits per second.The T-mobile service is the next step down. It is only GPRS (30-50k) and it only works where T-Mobile GSM service can be found. Check the coverage maps and you will see that the T-Mobile GSM coverage is far less in geographic extent than Verizon or Sprint or Cingular.
Finally Nextel. They do have an unlimited data service but it is miserable slow and Nextel's coverage map is even worse than T-Mobile's.
In the networks where two speeds are available (as a function of where you are) the card will automatically shift back and forth. The Verizon card will shift between 1X and EVDO; the Cingular (former AT&T W) card will shift between GPRS and Edge. One nice thing about the Verizon connection manager is it will actually tell you which of the two protocols has been negotiated. In contrast, the AT&TW/Cingular connection manager keeps you in the dark about whether it has negotiated EDGE or GPRS speeds.
The only monthly plans I recommend are the "all you can eat" plans. For $80 per month you can get "all you can eat" from Verizon, Cingular, or Sprint, at the top speed that each network offers. (Verizon has dropped the price of its 1X service to a mere $60 per month for all you can eat as long as it is only at 1X speeds.) For me the $80 per month is well worth it because the service works while I am in taxicabs and on trains and in hotels that would otherwise gouge me for Internet access, and it works in other random locations. None of this hunting around trying to find a WiFi hot spot when I step off the airplane. There are plans with a smaller cost per month, but you don't want them because they will charge per-kilobyte. A moderate hour of web surfing could cost $100 or more in per-kilo charges. You can see right away why it is unwise to choose anything but an all-you-can-eat monthly plan.
Now as to choice of equipment. You will see all sorts of posts where people gleefully describe how they use a USB cable or bluetooth between their computer and their cell phone or Treo and then use the cell phone or Treo to connect to the Internet, and manage to get by without having to pay the full $80 per month. Life is too short for this. First, when the carrier figures out you are using a computer (like you are visiting web sites using an HTTP protocol other than WA
I've been using verizon for about two months. I'm in Hickory NC, and I connect a about 128k. I was told that I was lucky to connect at that speed. I have not had a chance to travel with it. One thing that REALLY bugged the crap out of me was verizons smtp servers SUCK A BIG FAT ONE. If you don't have your own smtp server, you have to use their smtp server for outgoing. You can't connect to another isp's smtp server from verizons network.. this is true of any isp you connect to. The issue that I was having was that it just would not connect, no matter what I set the pocket pc to do; authenticate / no authentication, ect , ect. I know it was a problem with their crappy servers because using a wireless 802.11b card I could connect to my linux/postfix server with no probs. The way I solved this problem is that I use PPTP vpn to my firewall , that gets me on my local network, then I use my smtp server for outgoing. This is also good because it's somewhat secure. It is the ONLY vpn I could get working on the pocket pc and it is a freakin PAIN to set up. There is some software out there that does IPSEC but it's buggy as crap and I could not get any of it to work. I'm no newbe either. I been setting up FreeSwan vpns for about 5 years. After using it, quite honestly, I'm considering cancelling the service and just using regular dial up to get email. You CAN do that with the pocket pc. It's only 14.4 kbs , but still fast enough to get email, especially if you use an imap account. It definately is not worth 79.99 per month. But in your situation, here's what I would do: sign up for the service. then see what it connects at. You have something like 15 days to cancel the service with no penalty. Then you still have a nice pocket pc / phone that will connect at 14.4. This is a REALLY nice pocket pc, and I don't have to carry around both a pocket pc and phone. go for the xv-6600, NOT the other one. the first pocket pc they came out with sucks. Have I sold you yet ?? Good luck !
I've hopped around cell phone providers over the years (the only I've never tried is Sprint) and they all have a clause that you can cancel the contract and get 100% of your money back as long as you do so within x (3?) days. I could be wrong, but they're all required to do so by law. Even my gym membership had the same clause, and they told me it's required by law.
EV-DO is fastest.
For $80/month, all you can eat, it's gonna beat the hell out of a low quality dialup connection.
If you've some friends to make hops to one who has a decent DSL or cable connection, you may want to go by wire. High speed point to point modems are cheap surplus these days. 5kM range is about it for twisted pair. So you buy a dry pair to a buds house , set up a repeater, buy another dry pair from his house to bud with cable or DSL, and you're out some $20-40/month for higher speed.
and why GPRS data rates in the UK are so high. Unfortunately the nice telecom companies chose to price UMTS data to price match GPRS... which makes it completely unusably for normal people for any real net use.
We use UMTS and GPRS in a private networking environment, which means: no ipsec, no ssl, no encryption. Connection with internet is made through our internetpeering account on AMS-IX. I guess regarding that type of solution is the fastest you can get: no overhead and 100% controle over every bit of data sent. It's not an expensive solution (flatfee Euro 75,- an month) and it integrates DSL, fiber, ISDN and GPRS/UMTS of all our branches, mobile workers and home workers. On performance: latency on UMTS is pretty low (around 150ms), which makes for acceptable Skype quality. UMTS covarage in Holland is about 70%. In other situations you need GPRS, which is okay since you don't have the 25-40% overhead you normally get because of encryption. We don't have any jitter. Since we have a private networking environment, we do use our own business rules for firewalling, meaning we also use Ichat AV over UMTS: working okay! :)
We have people in China and Israel using a PC Card in their Mac to work through private GPRS on our servers here in Holland.
I use Sprint for CDMA data over a Sierra Wireless AirCard 550. It is primarily used in a pinch or when I'm on the road, and it is fantastically reliable. As for the 153kbps it flashes on my Windows networking icon in my systray upon connection... well, I wouldn't quite count on that.
Coverage is great, even when driving 80 mph down the highway. Speeds are sufficient for ssh/terminal sessions, and lightweight browsing (I might recommend turning off graphics on your browser).
So, to be brief (because I'm one hand typing with an infant in my other arm), the $79/mo. is great for mission critical wireless connectivity... but as a primary method of connectivity? Only as a last option due to cost and performance. I'd say it's about the speed of dialup on steroids, especially faster when you've got "5 bar" reception.
"A network enginner always carries a short length of Cat 5 cable with him. If he ever gets lost in the wilderness, he simply buries that cable, waits, and asks the backhoe operator for directions"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Bamford
I swear the mobile (cell) industry could steal the entire broadband industry in a month if they simply offered flat-rate internet access through your phone at a decent speed (even as low as 256Kb to start with) - you plug it into your PC when your at home, and you get to take the power of the internet with you everywhere without having to worry about expensive per/mb or per/min connections or if you can find a wifi spot - this would revolutionise the industry - there would simply be no reason to have wired broadband unless you had some appalling reception, broadband providers would be forced to slash their prices and up their speeds just to stay in the business and even then, you just can't compare flat-rate home internet with flat-rate mobile internet, people will go for the mobile - the networks are loosing out on this one, i'd drop my adsl and pay the same per month to my mobile network in an instant!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Maybe, but practically, it is a lot cheaper to have a tower and transmiter supporting 1000s of connections than laying cables for them.
With a USB cable on a Samsung A600 phone I get 230k all the time. Very very nice for work when the filter keeps me from my webmail accounts. The wife stays connected all the way from Cola SC to Burlington NC on car trips. Nothing but good in this area on this type of connection. Only problem is I keep losing(?) cables. I've bought 3 since I first showed the setup to friends.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
The easiest way to know if the cellular internet service is going to work is by looking to see if your cell phone works. If your cell phone is with the same carrier, it's signal bars will mirror those of the wireless data service.
I'm in a similar situation - too far for DSL, too expensive to run cable (at the time, building my house 1/4 mile from the main road seemed like a good idea - now Comcast wants $1500 to run the wire up my driveway, and the won't tie into it if I do it.) I do have fairly reliable dial-up, but it's still just dial up.
We've been using Verizon's wireless data service at my work (I work in the IT dept. at a large East Coast LE agency) since 1997, starting with their CDPD service, and are now in the process of switching to their 1x CDMA service. I've been using CDMA on my take-home laptop for about 18 months now and it's all but eliminated my use of dial-up at home.
The service is fast - faster than dial-up at least. It is not nearly as fast as DSL, but you can use it anywhere - if I'm on call it's not a problem to chuck the laptop in the trunk of the car and be available from anywhere there's Verizon phone service. I have used their 3x service while at a conference in DC last summer, and it was faster (or seemed so) than the wired connection availalbe in my hotel room, but it's not available in my area yet.
The downsides - it's not for gaming. Just like the DirectWay service, there's built-in latency. I've tried it once, and it's just not any good. I use my dial-up to game, and use the CDMA and the laptop for Ventrillo - that works pretty well.
And the expense - it will go down, fairly rapidly I expect. When we first started using CDMA about 2 years ago, we were paying $80 per month per account for unlimited use. It's now down to $55 per month per account for the same service.
I would check with my local cell phone shop to see if they will let you 'test' a CDMA (tho with Cingular I expect it's GMRS, or GPRS, forget their acroym) phone for a few days, you can at least see how it's going to work for you.
I have a treo 650 on cingular and my experience is that the EDGE connection tops out at 130kbps (it is typically around 100kbps). This is in the Northern NJ/NYC area.
So far the only workable solution is Verizon Wireless Broadband data service - when within 1xEvDO area, I'm often getting up to 1 megabit speed (downloads top 100 kilobytes per second), which is usually only within New York and some nearest New Jersey (and who needs that service in New York, where you can't walk 10 foot without being within somebody else's open wifi spot? ;) ). If you live somewhere where you say you live - I wouldn't expect speeds more than that of dial-up, let alone latency significantly shorter than the 600 msecs you're getting with your satellite.
AT&T, by the way, was the worst one of all - slowest speeds, worse coverage.
Just wait for NZ to descend into lawlessness and tribal warfare like central Africa. There's copper in them thar hills.
It's faster than dialup but slower than broadband.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Here in New Zealand I use one of these for remote access, and sometimes it's great and sometimes it ain't.
Networks in New Zealand come in three flavours:
The best of these is definitely the 1x EVDO network. If I get on that one I get ping times down around the 100mS mark, and surfing is good, ssh is good, everything is good. Well good, as in "gee, I can surf the intarweb thingy from the back of a taxi", but it doesn't compare to WLAN or wired speeds really.
The other two are significantly less good. I haven't used the GSM much because my own card is CDMA, but one of my co-workers has a GSM card, and it seems about the same as basic CDMA, perhaps a bit slower raw bandwidth, but maybe a bit better on latency. The latency on the CDMA often sucks. In poorer coverage areas 600mS is normal, and I have seen it all over the map, from 400mS to 2000mS. That sort of latency can then lead to DNS lookup failures, and so surfing suffers. SSH is really laggy, and so forth. Raw downloads are OK-ish.
In my case I'm using these cards under Linux, where they work, but no real support from the supplier for them in my environment. It's OK, though, so I wrote my own page about the Aircard 580 on Linux to help people get it going.
So, lets take it from the beginning.
h tm
After checking your links I assume the service presented to you are data over the cellular network for mobile phones. Not WiFi.
The cards are of either PCS or GSM type, which in it self needs to be checked out, because these are not the same. The functionality is basically the same, but they are not compatible. To get a rough grip on what the situation is read this page.
http://www.arcx.com/sites/Technical%20Comparison.
It is fairly short and rather accurate.
What it all is about is using the cellular (mobile phone) network as a carrier for data. This is a standard feature in later mobile systems, but there are enhancements.
Because of the burst characteristics of data communication operators and manufacturers realised data traffic needed a totally different architecture in the air interface not to overload the systems.
Today all systems are having enhancements to boost data traffic.
The drawback of Package Data on mobile systems is that operators down prioritize this in favour for traditional voice callas where they make more money.
In GSM data transmission is called GPRS with the enhancement EDGE.
Limitations in EDGE are among other things distance to nearest antenna, allocated resources and release level.
These are things you can not control easily, so I propose a "buy and try".
As I recall the maximum throughput is some theoretical 300+ Kb.
Count this one out as more than theoretical, but I have heard of people achieving very high, and even higher throughput on GSM/GPRS/EDGE.
I am not that familiar with PCS but when I worked with the package data node for GSM called GPRS I worked with PCS people for the Japan market. As I recall it is basically the amount of timeslots that differ, the rest same-same as GPRS/EDGE so from my perspective this is actually another TDMA technology under another brand name.
But ask the operator what throughput they think they can provide.
The important thing is that you make sure they are talking about package data (don't know if they call it GPRS in PCS).
UMTS or WCDMA is the best system for data transmission. I do not think The States are very hot on that. It is mainly us in Europe and Far East. I think US has said that 3G (third generation of mobile telephony) is going to be implemented via GSM and GPRS/EDGE.
The problem with UMTS is as always, you share resources with others and there area no guarantee of bandwidth.
None of the cards in the links were UMTS cards so I think we can rule out this one.
As an unorthodox proposal I think you could check out an antenna solution.
There are several suppliers for antennas so you can build a point-to-point solution. The only thing you need is "line of sight" and a friend at the other end having a xDSL or "broad band" connection.
My cell phone is capable of this over PCS via IR link to my laptop but I don't dare try it because you are only allowed 5kb of traffic per month and then it's $15/MB after that! If their network is really as fast as they say you could sit there downloading the latest movie trailer and be spending over $1000 an hour! My provider also has a $100 a month "unlimited" plan but it's not unlimited, it's unlimited megabytes but not unlimited minutes connected, I can't remember how much a minute they charge you after you go over but you can bet they make up for any money lost by giving you unlimited MB. I sure hope this mythical Wimax is really on the way.
So I've used both EVDO and OFDM - two different kinds of broadband data over mobile phone frequencies.
So what did I think of it?
In general, very very nice. Think WLAN but being able to really move around. The biggest problem I had with both is that buildings tended to be very good RF shields, so unless I was close to a window, reception was very poor.
To test it out, I put a laptop on the frontseat of my car, ping'ing. For about 10 minutes I drove without _any_ interruption.
In the testing I did, EVDO was clearly superior to OFDM but I'm not sure if this was because of the installed base of towers supporting EVDO being greater than OFDM or technical reasons (I suspect it being a tower issue.)
EVDO can have two modes of operation - high speed and low speed, with automatic failover from one to the other, if you're on the move and transition from an area that supports EVDO to just 1x. OFDM doesn't have this.
In other, more leasuirely testing, I took a laptop, connected to the 'net, from outside where I lived for a walk through the park next door, sitting down at trees from time to time, in the shade to browse the web, etc.
Would I pay $80/month for this kind of service? Not if I could get cable or ADSL. Laptop screens don't deal very well with large amounts of daylight. If I couldn't get ADSL/cable? Yes, I'd go it. Afterall, it can only get cheaper, right?
However, I'm not sure if my testing is a very good indication of what real life use will be if there is a better than low takeup of the service in your area. The reason being is that these are both broadcast technologies and so the bandwidth available to you is subject to the number of people using it, a la 10Base2 or 10Baset with hubs and not switches.
Not to threadjack, but it's sort of on-topic...
Does anyone have any information about if it's possible to dial into a remote setup with a cell phone modem installed? Being able to construct a remote station somewhere and access it wirelessly through the cell network would come in handy.
=Smidge=
Many countries is skipping? Do people even read this stuff before they submit it???
Somebody who's got dsl closer to the exchange.
Go halves in it with them, drop in a DIY wireless link for a couple of hundred bucks, and you're good to go.
These days, practically every DSL provider (the telcos) impose a ToS that forbids every DSL customer, even the business accounts, from redistributing the bandwidth or acting as any form of ISP themselves. The next generation of ToS contracts will also ban co-ops and even "private clubs" who are formed for the sole purpose of distributing the bendwidth amongst the members.
My comcast cable connection which has a 128 up cap, and a rotten down of around 1.3 costs me $64.71 a month. I am sick of whiny kids calling 60 a month expensive, depending on where you live you get raped on broadband regardless. Cincinnati I can get 5 times that speed for half that cost, Flint Michigan ( NOT THE HOME OF MICHAEL FATBOY MOORE) has two choices Yahoo/Sucky Bell Connection for too much money or Comcrap for too much money.
You also get a real IP address that is not firewalled. So, you could technically run a server. I was able to SSH to my laptop from "landline" connected computer.
In the UK and Ireland, Vodafone at least market a 3G PCMCIA card that does apparently give broadbandish connectivity (download; upload is appalling). There may be something similar from one of your local phone companies, assuming they have 3G or equivalent in the US. Realisically tho, you may be better stick with the satillite (I'm assuming there's no line-of-site or other radio packet service locally?)
Me (Blog)
I have ther verizon, evdo service. $80/month is a bit heffty, and there is no way I would ever pay it (Of course, if work is pay'n...well that's different). I'm in downtown chicago, and in most places I get very good service and i can easaly get DL speeds of over 350 k/s, and upload at about 175. I'd say that's not bad while your drive'n in a car. I recently took a trip to Hawaii, and at the San Fran air port, I got no signal at all. while in Hawaii i could only get regular cell service, a bit better then dial-up. All in all if there there is signal, hell yeah it's ready for prime time, but if your not in an area where evdo or some 3g tech is avalible, I sure hope your arn't the one pay'n for it.
Yes.
.net via a direct GPRS connection. It is relatively easy to setup--my Bluetooth USB dongle's software had the setup in it automatically, but a dial-up connection over Bluetooth to a paired cell phone with the phone number *99***1# will connect directly to the network.
It's rather simple, actually. Of course, I am talking here about GSM/GPRS w/ Bluetooth. I am a "Former AT&T Wireless" customer of Cingular. When in a pinch, I can use Bluetooth to connect my laptop to the
Speed is slow, but usable for quick checks of the office email et al. Standard GPRS data rates apply.
I imagine the same principal applies for other networks w/ a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, but I cannot speak from experience.
Do you even know what == and != mean? I'm sick of people using them here to talk about sets. You know, set and subsets. There's a whole bunch of math and stuff based on it, but since it isn't built into C++ no one on Slashdot seems to have ever heard of it.
I was in the same situation about five or so years ago. 22,800 feet from the nearest central office, DSL was just -barely- usable, and it was not very stable.
Couple of years later, the local telco got smart and started installing curbside DSLAMs, called 'Stingers,' to serve areas that were more than optimal distance from the CO.
Stingers consist of a single high-speed copper or fiber link back to the central office (usually at least a T3 or its fiber equivalent) which is then split out into DSL pipes for however many subscribers they planned for.
They're wonderful inventions. My download speed went from an average of 256K (if I was lucky) to over 768K practically overnight, once they switched my pipe over to the curbside terminal. It's been utterly stable ever since, with only a brief outage caused by an extended neighborhood power failure (and my servers went down because of that same outage anyway).
My advice would be to bug the crap out of your local telco, and find out when they're going to install a few neighborhood DSLAMs.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I recently went through this. I was an ISDN customer years ago when Verizon was pushing it. Great introductory rates. Acceptable monthly rates. I had ISDN "broadband" in my apartment before most local businesses! I upgraded to cable and DSL as they came out.
Then I moved to the deep sticks. Just last year when I tried to get ISDN I learned several things:
* I would have had to pay a $250 deposit to "test the line" and that was non-refundable even if the test failed
* If any equipment was needed at the CO, I would have to pay for it, since it was no longer a standard stock item, but I wouldn't actually own the equipment
* I'd have to find my own ISDN modem (eBay, baby! $20 Netopias)
It was much cheaper for the install and the monthly bill to get an analog modem router (ebay, again -- I'll sell you a WebRamp or you could build a PC box) and 2 or 3 phone lines. UT2004 is remarkably responsive over modems, I must say. WolfET was unplayable. Starcraft was okay. City of Heroes works.
So I just waited and then, magically and inexplicably, cable came down my very rural mountain-side road (in the state with the 48th worst broadband penetration in the US). I'm not sure what cosmic debt I now owe, but I am currently quite happily surfing at 6Mb down and 512kb up!
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
yes WiMax will have a much lower latency than a satellite.
The delay on the first packet is really a bitch (years).
I've been using Cingular's Edge card in a laptop for about 3 weeks now and have been pretty satisfied. I get about 180kbs when I have all bars lit up. It does have a bit of latency but that can be improved if you setup a profile that turns off their compression and proxy services.
My 2 cents...
I have their mobile office kit on my LG vx4400.. and i must admit... their 3G service is pretty decent for being on the road, i pull 16 KB/sec down roughly with good service... connection reliability is basically crap though.
This is also true in Nicaragua. Plenty of people have cell phones, but hardly anyone has any minutes (prepaid only). But then again, no one has any money either. Nicaragua goes back and forth with Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. They do "have" land lines but it's about as unreliable as the power and water which is sometimes run by the people themselves. Yes, power lines sometimes consists of barbed wire or scraps of wire or anything else they can find to string up along the road, and some brave (or dumb) guy gets to be the one to hook it up to the main power line. I almost got clotheslined (no pun intended) by a powerline strung low across a road as I was riding on the back of a LandCruiser (ducked at literally the last second).
Thus providing yet one more in the endless series of examples of short-sighted development assistance that fails to help in the long run.
Wireless is cheap to put in but it provides vastly inferior quality and limited bandwidth. And while the capital infrastructure costs are lower, the ongoing operational costs (you know, the ones that you have to pay forever) are higher.
For the majority of Africans who almost never go farther than a quick walk of their home, wirelessness is a pointless frill that they'll be paying for for years to come.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Not only are you right about broadband cellular, you're right about cellular in general. I've done the testing in urban areas at 3AM, and I can tell you that the latency is systemic. You can be in the perfect footprint with nobody else in the cell sector, and you will STILL run 400ms delays. Moreover, this appears to apply to both GSM-based (EDGE) and CDMA-based (1xRTT) networks.
Voice channels likely also have ths latency, but given that the person on the other end can't turn around a conversation in 10ms, you won't notice this during voice calls.
The real killer is that at these high latencies, some applications move beyond poor performance to to become almost unusable. Applications that do many serial connections, or depend on regular DNS lookups will see their performance plummet, possibly to the point of application failure. The detailed info needed to predict which apps will suffer is typically not available, and only thorough testing ($$$) will let you know how well the app/connection combo works.
Cant remember the G3 specs (2mbit?) - but one thing is what it should be able to do - another is what the telco is putting in.
I worked for a short time (student summerjob) for a big telco putting up G3 network - most base stations didnt have more than 4-8mbit to the network. The hub with most bandwith was 16mbit - thats 8 phones going at full speed - (In fact you would have around a 1.000 phones roaming on that hub)
Ohh and no phone actually supports that bandwith as far as I know - it uses way to much power to go at that speed.
NPOE
"Possible exception: your dad's the farmer who gave up part of his field for a cel phone tower..."
But's slowly getting brain-damaged from all dem rays shinin' down.
If you have Cell Phone service you are not even near the boonies yet.
I live in East Tennessee. I can not even get a cell phone connection, the phone company people do not know what DSL is, and the best quote I have for a T1 is over $1500 per month.
So I had no choice but to go Direcway. Of course my job (the only one I could find in 6 months looking) needs a VPN connection. Not to mention the dozens of other ways Direcway does not work like a regular connection.
I am starting to realize I made a mistake moving to a place further behind than most third world countries. (I wish some bible thumping politicians from the area would read this).
Anyhow, quit your bitchin, you got it good if you have cell phone coverage.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Do you actually have to pay the $5/month to do this? My calls to verizon seem to indicate that you can use your phone as a modem with any plan, but your minutes allotment will be used. Does the $5-plan cover this? Can you tell me what, specifically, the plan is called?
The other thing you need to carefully consider before getting a CDMA card/account is what you want to use itt for. I worked in Customer Service for a large national provider, and the absolute worst calls to get were people who thought that an "unlimited data transfer" account allowed them to do everything they would do on a broadband account.
Well, check that EULA, cowboy, because in a lot of cases (heck, I even found one in my comcast cable EULA) there's a special "appropriate use" or "bandwidth abuse" clause that will allow them to slap you with huge, I mean thousands of dollars in some cases that I saw, if you do things like p2p or streaming video.
The other problem is that the provider, in every case that I've seen, won't tell you where the threshold is that unlimited is no longer really unlimited. It's based off some calculated cost of carrying your subscription that the corporate office usually doesn't even share with their CS folks, and if they do happen to know, they won't share it with you the customer for fear of disciplinary action. Once you pass that nebulous line, your account is shut off and any data transfer you got in before they noticed and shut you off (nope, it's not even an automated process)is charged to you to the tune of something around $0.25 a K. We had one college student run Kazaa or something similar on her CDMA connection for month, doing megabyte after megabyte over the limit, and she, no joke, ended up with a bill in the neighborhood of $23,000.
In any event, speeds on our network, which were heavily connection-strength dependent, ran an average of probably 120k, and were effectively faster for html traffic with the provided compression software. It seemed like an ok tech for mobile professionals of the sort who don't always have time to go to a hotspot to send and receive e-mail, but I would recommend it to very few people outside that rarefied set.
When I looked into this some years ago, (I also was a DirecPC user) the wireless folks were all comparing their "effective" speeds (i.e. with compression) to everyone else's actual speeds (i.e. without compression). Beside being dishonest it only provides benefit if you only xmit/recv uncompressed data. The actual bandwidth wasn't much, if any, better than top dialup speeds. Still, if you're only getting 17~18kbps, 50kbps might be a big improvement. As many others have alluded to, signal quality is paramount. Another option, if line of site permits, is to setup a neighborhood system using a wireless T1 - a fellow I know did just that. He paid the $800 US per month for a wireless T1 (microwave I believe) and shared the cost with his neighbors. Everyone's share came out to about $60 US per month. Just an idea...
"The claim is 'wireless online surfing as fast as DSL'." Exactely, what they define DSL speed to be is not 3.0Mbps but often 256kbps at best
I work at a company that is in the oil fields throughout the Midwest. I have been running a test program using the Cingular Air cards deploying them to users in those fields (laptops) and managers. I have one in my laptop. I also purchased a PCI adapter for PCMCIA cards to go in a desktop system for a site with too few people to justify the cost of a frame connection. I have had no issues with the cards so far. They install easy and work in most locations. They are just like a cell telephone and need the signal to operate. I have found and confirmed that even if you have signal and are able to connect to the Cingular infrastructure that a weaker signal will have a slower connection. I live in the Atlanta area and the connections I have had are very fast so I can't complain. Also not all areas are covered with the data capabilities in the towers but they are working on that. I also implemented VPN connections via the card. It uses your existing VPN client if you have one set up and so far I have had no complaints. I have been happy with the ability to be driving down the road and be able to stop and connect back into the network to troubleshoot issues. On the other hand it is also an additional tether that allows you to be work accessible so sometimes that sucks. We have had two types of service plans. One is $70+fees/tax with unlimited usage and they give you the card (yea right). The other is $35+fees/tax but is limited to 20mb transfer per month and then charges you for data past that point. Needless to say we only have a few of those and now only obtain the unlimited. I have about 40 of these in use right now looking to have around 300 when all said and done. Hope this helps. -Joe
We've been hearing about all the chipsets. Does anyone have a link to actual gear that can be bought today? How about a link to an ISP that has announced a rollout? I'm not being sarcastic. I really have an interest in the technology, and would like it to suceed, but I just don't see it happening.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Wireless is by nature a less reliable medium, because it's passing through air and trees and walls -- as opposed to copper
Not entirerly true. For years, the majority of AT&T's long distance network backbone (Long Lines) was wireless. When old timers refer to the "Bell standard", they're referring to a rock-solid telephone network that actually ran mostly over microwave long-distance transmission facilities. When engineered in point-to-point configurations where each endpoint is a known quantity, wireless (aka microwave) has nearly identical reliability to modern fiber transmission systems.
Point-multipoint wireless (e.g. cellular last-mile) is a totally different animal in that you have your subscriber endpoint that is often mobile and nearly always at locations you have never engineered for. Your cell engineering becomes an estimate for coverage rather than actual end-to-end engineering, and subsequently has issues with fade and interference from objects, terrain, etc.
That said, if you're looking for reliable last-mile rural service, consider fixed wireless. Properly engineered, it will match any cable or fiber system.
*scoove*
I'm facing the same challenge as the article submitter. The boss has a log cabin in NC, but no cable or broadband service. If you want to know what works, talk to installers. Starband/Direcway is crap. The upload bandwidth sucks. An installer in Sylva, NC has turned me on to a company called DataBahn. I don't know how much of their pitch is signal vs noise, but it sounds interesting:
DataBahn products page
Anyone have any experience with this company? Testaments? Ridicule?
I am a software provider for Cell phone companies, so I get flooded with both sides that you need for this... the cell phone and technology side. In my area you'll be lucky to get 1.5X 56K speeds from Cingular! Verizon however you will likely get at least 2X... Lastly sprint, if you are in a GOOD coverage area, ( Don't nessisarily trust the sales people ) then you can get near broadband speeds. I would recommend activating the plan and taking it home and trying it... with Cingular you have 14 days to return the phone/plan and will only get charged for the time you had it... I *think* Verizon and sprint are 30 days but don't quote me on that.. Lastly, if you do take my advice, DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING FROM THE STORE YOU BOUGHT IT THAT HAS ANY PENALTY FOR CANCELING BEFORE THE CARRIER SPECIFIED TERM... (many stores will charge you $400 if you cancel day 2 even though it is acceptable by the carrier.... you will get the best deals if you go to a non exclusive dealer, but you need to make sure you watch out for what you sign)
I'll assume you're not trolling since you've used the +1 bonus...
1) Wired infrastructure is not free of operational costs. Bandwidth costs money, no matter how you distribute it. Upgrading a wireless concentrator is on the same magnitude of expense as upgrading a wired concentrator, even on eBay.
2) Wired infrastructure also obsoletes quickly and expensively. Google for new york obsolete telephone for some very costly examples.
3) Africa is not a homogeneous zone of people "who almost never go farther than a quick walk [from] their home[s]". The various metropolises of the continent's northern coast are each different from Capetown. Mining and river towns of the eastern interior certainly have different communications needs than the coastal port cities on the western half of the continent, or the fishing communities of the north who need to deal with international markets on a daily basis. And yes, there are some Africans who, for various reasons, will never want or need any kind of telephone.
Please don't let your cultural baises and lack of information prejudice your viewpoints in this manner.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Try DirectPC or StarBand. It's Internet access via a Satellite Dish. This is made for your type of situation. There are solutions for people who own yahtts so I am sure it'll do just fine for you.
"Look out honey cause I'm using technology" Iggy Pop
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People will dig up copper wire and steal it to sell.
Africans might do such a thing, but I doubt that actual people would.
It's also worth pointing out that the two providers you mentioned, Sprint and Cingular, are both poor providers for rural areas.
It's not the provider's fault if they live in the wrong place.
I have a Sprint aircard for high speed wireless and it's really fast. It's like using your cell phone as a modem, no filters just Internet access. Regular cell data rates (3G1x) are not too much faster than dial-up, but EVDO is close to DSL.
If you're in a rural area, I wouldn't bet that you'll get EVDO coverage. You'll be at 3G speeds.
I don't know about T-mobile except that they get broken into. Verizon has a fairly unreliable network. If you are out in the country, EVDO isn't a good bet since it costs a lot to implement and the country markets aren't brimming with customers.
What a timely article! I am currently using CATV modem at 25Mbps. Yes, you read that right, and I typed that right. My area has DSL at about 50Mbps. My wife and I have to move in with her folks whilst we prepare to move to America. My in-laws don't have a local CATV company, and I'm still trying to translate why DSL can't be installed in the house. On th heels of ADSL and CATV is "hikari fiba, or FTTH to you and me. This promises 100Mbps. Yes, you read that right, and I typed that right. I was going to get this service for my own apartment: 100Mbps Internet, cable tv, IP phone all off the same fiber cable.. and best of all... that woulfd cost less than $60 a month -- what I pay not JUST for CATV modem!! Anyways, I scrapped that plan as we need to move as I said.
So, I've been pondering how to remain "connected" at 2005 speeds and not 1993 speeds since my in-laws use POTs at 56k. So I did some research today -- that is why this article was timely.
In Japan, the big 3 carriers offer data transfer, so you can connect your phone to your computer. My carrier, AU (by http://www.au.kddi.com/english/index.html) offers their service for WIN model phones (uses Qualcomm tech.) This service is up to 2.4Mbps, and you need a $11 USB cable. The plan structure requires a PhD to understand, so I'll need to talk to a human to figure it out. Of course the wireless network for cellular in Japan is far better than the US, so, if I do go this route, I will be cruising at 2.4Mbps and not 10 percent of advertised speed.
Well, that doesn't help the guy who posted the article, but I thought I would share what is going on outside the US. Bottomline, if the US doesn't shape up soon, people will truly consider it the "Siberia of the Internet." (i.e. not a place you want to go.) This has implications for education, commerce, and entertainment.
I think perhaps the president... ok, not this joker, but the next one, should set out a goal, like they did when man reached the moon -- At LEAST 1Mbps in every home. (By then Japan will be at 1Gbps. ha ha!)
Cheers,
Carlos, Editor, http://idevgames.com/ & http://idevapps.com/
I'm curious about this too as my GF doesn't have a land-line and just received a hand-me-down PC from her friend and would like to connect to the 'net with it, but I can't figure out how to use her cell phone as a modem without paying extra cash for a 'data-plan'.
I have an AirCard 550 that I use with Sprint service, and for the most part I'd say it's comparable to a 56k modem. Definitely check out your signal strength first though, when it's running at 1-2 bars the connection drops periodically. I didn't have any problems with latentcy myself; ping times were around 150-200ms to most places. Between dialup and DirecWay, it's a tough decision. I don't think I would trade the bandwidth of the sattelite for the lower latentcy of the cell. I would probably wait for the next generation >1MBps services first. Or find a friend a couple miles away with a cable modem and convince them to aim a high-gain 802.11b antenna at your house.
The fact that there always costs, or that costs are similar for a certain piece of equipment which is fundamentally irrelevant to the underlying transport except for the interface bolted onto the side, sidesteps the point that there are a lot of costs which are quite different, from spectrum rental, to managing active infrastructure spread as densely as every few hundred meters across the coverage area, to the far faster upgrade cycle of current wireless technology.
I see a lot of stories about equipment that was decommissioned after decades in service, long after depreciation writedown had faded to distant memory. What is that supposed to tell me?
If this discussion is about providing coverage to Mombasa and Cairo, then it's pretty irrelevant that we're talking about Africa, as the problems and issues are about the same as anywhere else at similar levels of development and economic activity. It's the interior and the small places where it becomes interesting.
But nevertheless, in the cities and the countryside, just like in Europe and everywhere else, a wired last-mile is cheaper in the long run and just as useful (or moreso) in the majority of situations. As a consumer you may not clue into this, since cell phones seem cool, and that Crazy Frog is really a tremendous artistic milestone. Perhaps your cultural bias is clouding your judgment.
I'm curious about the cultural bias you've identified. Can you clarify? For instance, where am I from? I will mention that I've lived and worked in Africa (as well as Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania), and traveled on foot and by hitched rides on cargo trucks across much of the continent, meeting an awful lot of those people who don't get out of town much. You?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Recently, I tired data-over-cell, since it had some impressive numbers. While the throughput over the frequencies might be okay, the error rate is just horrendous, which results in overall *very* sluggish speeds. Okay (sometimes) for MSN, the odd non-graphical page, but otherwise pretty useless.
Direcway is far better; hopefully some day low flying satellites with lower latency, higher bandwidth, will be available. For now, you might look into finding someone within DSL/Cable range, and getting one of those 5ghz band long distance wireless repeater thiniges to relay it to you (probably run you a few grand, but overall would give you high speed, reliability, and low latency).
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And what, then, exactly are we to use it with?
WiMax type solutions are already being deployed in Phoenix, AZ and Knoxville, TN. I know this because I built one of the linux boxes that are going to manage authentication and encryption. Check it out at www.wisight.com. It's the bomb. The guy heading the effort was sitting in my buddies back yard the other day connected back to his house, 10 miles away with no clear line of sight, and was getting 4 Mbps download speeds.
I recently purchased an EDGE compatible phone, and have been connecting to Cingular's "all you can eat" data plan for $25/month. I've been less than impressed.
While I was able to (finally) get the phone to allow my laptop to connect, after calling customer service and having them flip a switch that was missed during the original configuration, I get about 20-40Kbs, based on some of the free "measure your connection speed" tools on the internet. While I never intended to play games via this method, I was still hoping for better than dial up. I thought EDGE would give me that.
Details of my situation, any of which could be a contributing factor: I am connecting via BlueTooth from a PowerBook, running OS X 10.4.1 using Ross Barkman's 3G scripts. I am using a Moto v551, which for sure is EDGE compatible; and I have been testing the speed of the connection from Gaithersburg MD, which is a scant 30 minutes N of Washington DC. While I'm not actually in the city itself, I would bet that if my speed with Cingular isn't so good here, it's not going to be any better in any of the corn states either.
I hope to get into the city to see if it just doesn't extend this far out; could be an issue with the modem scripts too, I suppose, or maybe BT connections are limited. Or something.
Bottomline is that I found this an incredibly frustrating experience, purchasing my first phone: all of these vendors are long on promise and short on delivery, with complicated, expensive plans, limited explanation of what they'll actually deliver for the price, and you have to sign up for 2 years just to find all that out. I'm really much more interested in having the feature work than just listed in the brochure, believe it or not. And based on this experience I sure as hell am not inclined to to purchase any of the other services that they want to cram down my throat.
--
$tar -xvf
I've used Sprint's offering the in the NY/NJ area and it was quite good. I've never had a Sprint phone, this was strictly data service and came with a PC card only. I'd say it was as fast as an average DSL line.
Not sure what you're reading, but "for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games" seems to clearly state that they reserve the right to cut you off for downloading (see the third word in that bit above) movies or music...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
"A network enginner always carries a short length of Cat 5 cable with him. If he ever gets lost in the wilderness, he simply buries that cable, waits, and asks the backhoe operator for directions"
It's fiber, not Cat 5. Also, it's engineer, not enginner.
Happy to help, no need to thank me.
No digging needed. In many cases, they are overhead wires. All you need is a good jute rope and a rock for premium quality copper.
I currently use one of TMobile's Sony Erickson's PC Cards and I have know complaints. I have wireless data service in places that I normally would have dropped calls. I pay $20 a month (I'm told that now it is $30 i signed up right a way when it came out). I had the same service with my pocket pc (hp6315) and I wasn't impressed but when I used the PC Card I realized that the processor in my pocket PC was not big enough to utilize the wireless DATA as I wanted to. DSL FAST.....??? Not quite but close. It's the best way to have service on the go that I've found.
I work all day at a customer office that doesn't provide network access, even analog lines. I have 1xEVDO service through Verizon Wireless, which is the only "broadband" option available through my employer. (Other carriers may offer similar service, but only their lower-speed plans are available through my employer.)
My experience is that I usually get about 500 kbps in major metropolitan areas, which is about what they advertise. (1xEVDO is only availalable in certain cities; the card is supposed to "fall back" to ISDN-like speeds in other areas.) 500 kbps is certainly faster than the approximately 150 kbps that the other carriers advertise, but it's not competitive with DSL or a cable modem. In fact it's about one tenth of what I consider to be true "broadband" speed. At the same time, it is about ten times as fast as analog dial-up.
Latencies are also pretty high -- as much as 900 ms for the first hop. I'm not sure why this is the case. A stranger problem is that a few web sites, which are accessible from other networks can't even be pinged when I'm connected this way. (I can connect when I connect to my employer's VPN and configure my browser to use their socks server, so it's definitely a problem with Verizon's network.) money.cnn.com shows this problem, but just about everything else works fine. (Regardless, this is almost certainly a routing problem, not something specific to the cellular service.)
I have no idea how this compares to your current satellite service, but hopefully this is of some help. (BTW, the AirPrime PC Card that Verizon uses does work with Linux.)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I have a barebones phoneline for my dsl connection, I'm only able to receive calls, if I call people, then they charge me per minute. $13.00 a month, gotta love it.
-gjr
You're absolutely right about the latency. I've got Verizon's 1xRTT / 1xEV-DO service, and live in one of the metro areas supported by the higher-speed 1xEV-DO service. It's great for downloading files and checking email, but terrible for remote ssh sessions due to latency. Works in a pinch though if I'm out and about and need to check on a server.
My only other complaint about Verizon's service is that there are major areas with no service at all. The rule of thumb is, if you're on a Verizon-owned cell tower, you'll get at least the 1xRTT speed (similar to dial-up). But the entire state of Oklahoma, most of Kansas, most of west Texas, and most of New Mexico have no coverage at all. These areas are all covered by roaming agreements with other cell carriers incapable of providing coverage. I can't speak for areas outside the southwest.
give it up ... offtopic and people understood what he meant.
We tested this solution out. Sucked. It's connnection dropped when our Cell phones on the same network worked.
The latency was horrible. We were using Citrix. Same fragging lag problems online gaming has.
The connection speed would sometimes hit 115kbit/s, but usually we averaged around 20kb/s with all of the data resends.
And read the TOS. $80 unlimited doesn't mean unlimited to all carriers. Just like with ISP's, unlimited can mean limited, and does with some of these contracts.
Here in Bermuda there is a place trying to offer it (I am fairly sure I heard that they started offering before getting license approval for the airwaves and therefore are tied up in that, but I might be a month behind in that news).
One of the guys here in the office got it and was showing me, bragging that he was getting "900KB per second". Not only was that figure off, but he was only looking at a Windows XP pop that claimed 900kbps as the connection speed.
We tried various bandwidth testing sites and it looked to be like a pretty rock solid 300kbps.
The system was pretty impressive, but at the time that I saw it, essentially nobody else would have been in this system. I don't know how sensitive this sort of system (if at all) is to increased users running it (meaning if we were seeing that speed with no users, would 10K users around you then drop the speed or make the connection futz out?).
That service is about $70 a month here all included, unlimited usage. That is way cheaper than the $200 a month I pay for "512kbps" which never tops over 350kbps in real use. (I have to pay the phone company and I have to pay the ISP, each want about $100).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
who let you out of the library? Go back inside before you get a sunburn or something.
It's about as reliable as a voice cellphone conversation. If you're in a good area, you get decent throughput. if not well then you are SOL. It worked for me in a deadline situation... http://www.howdyoudoit.com/article.php?story=20050 403160012608
My vacation house is at a site where AT&T (and now Cingulair), the only service with a cell feeding the area, has stated that they have no intent to upgrade it (from TDMA) to current technology any time soon, if ever. This despite their apparent dedication to abandoning TDMA for GSM elsewhere in their network.
I have often wished for a modem using modulation schemes that make efficient use of the channel through the various cellphone/cell site audio codecs (as the 56k modems do the phone network's G.711 digitization scheme). That way I could use the unlimited night/evening voice service to hit a modem at my home, which also has DSL, and achieve an internet link at close to the underlying data rate of the cellphone, rather than having no data service at all.
Such a scheme would also be useful for companies with traveling employees, in this case relaying off the company datacenter. It would similarly provide a quality data link in areas where cellphone native data services aren't available (and possibly save a bunch of money by making such service add-ons unnecessary.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How much are you paying?
We have a WiMax connection in the British Virgin Islands. The latency is 2000ms and is virtually unusable for anything else.
At least you have voice coverage in those areas, which is better than with most other service providers.
:) In upstate NY where I went to college as an undergrad, VZW was and still is the coverage king by a long shot. Most other providers don't have any coverage whatsoever (not even voice) 4-5 miles outside of Ithaca, NY.
VZW has the widest voice coverage of any service provider. In theory Cingular/AT&T could beat them, but the merger is still proving to be a technological nightmare. I've heard numerous stories of Cingular customers whose phones would not talk to an AT&T tower unless there were NO Cingular towers accessible, even if the AT&T tower had a much stronger and more reliable signal.
VZW *just works*.
But for broadband, wired is currently the only option until 4G wireless capability comes along. (For example, Flarion's FLASH-OFDM system provides much lower latencies than EV-DO/RTT, and higher throughputs too. But it's only been deployed in a handful of small test areas so far, nothing major yet.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
From my own personal experience I used Cingular / AT&T's Edge network and it had pretty good through put. I would say it is comparable to a low end DSL connection(256K in my market). You may also want to look at Verizon b/c they just actually dropped the price of their 1xRTT price b/c they have launched limited access to the new higher speed data network. I never had any problems with VPN access or port blocking with my Cingular wireless access card it really just depends on what exactly you want to do with your connection.
I use Verizons $80 plan for the same reasons (no high speed access at home and D-WAY sux). I have the V620 PC card in my laptop. I average 15kB/sec downloads or 120kbps. The service is very stable, never drops out when idle, and I have it networked to my desktop when I'm home. I love it compared to the 1.8kB/sec dialup I had B4. The best part is that verizon will be adding my area to the Broadband network this year. I'll then have 300-500kbps speed. I hate people that can have $30 DSL AND/OR cable! :) If you must have faster access, this is the way to go.
They frown on it huh? Gee, guess cingular should remove all the little notes on the phones and some of the service pages that say you can use the phone to hook up your laptop using their internet service. If they frown on that sort of thing and all... Or maybe you should just get your head out of your a$$ and figure out they don't care as long as it makes them money.
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
I work from cafés (yes, I actually buy stuff there too) quite a lot and I connect my laptop online using Bluetooth to my Nokia 6630, which in turn is connected to the Internet over 3G (UMTS). It works extremely well, the latency is about 500ms and the bandwith tends to be around 250 kbps or so, which is fine for that sort of usage.
I can talk on the phone at the same time if needed, send and receive text or MMS messages, and the net connection will keep on ticking.
This is in Finland though, so I don't know how well it would work in the USA.
People will dig up copper wire and steal it to sell.
It's worse than that, I'm afraid. During the fall of the Soviet Union, when vodka supplies ran short, they were stealing cables to ferment the insulation into a vile concoction known as Televod.
That is not true. However most of Minnesota does not have the Minnesota accent. You won't find it in the Twin Cities (We have more of an Iowa/Wisconsin accent). In Duluth you will find it, but mostly in out of towners coming in for their yearly shopping trip.
In northwest Minnesota you will find it, almost exactly like you hear in the movies. The more isolated the town, the more people who will have it.
I live in a semi-rural community and had used fixed wireless for a couple of years. I was getting >1mbs and pretty good service quality *when it was working well*. I also had no problem getting vpn working and latency was pretty low for gaming. I just switched to Cable even though I hated to -- the wireless guys were there when the big companies weren't and I wanted to be loyal to local companies. But the servicee just wasn't there and I was getting too many losses -- my vpn was dropping all the time, which meant I had to restart all my console sessions, etc.. And cable is giving me 7 Mbs. Yummy! Still, it is a totally viable solution. I would be happy to respond with more about what to look for in a provider, horror stories, etc.. if anyone is interested..
Hmmm, I got it as a part of the unlimited Text/Web package that was available to me at the time of signup. Verizon changes plans frequently, so they might not have a similar offering right now...
I would look for local ISP that will give you that sort service, there has been alot of small players in the market hitting cottage/farm land with wifi (802.11b) equipment. Mostly consists of getting above the treeline (use a silo) to get a signal... sometimes in open space with no other signals they can travel quite far.
There is also licensed bandwidth equipment which some places are using too. And in the next year hopefully the wimax will solve the last mile problem. Expect to pay some higher costs to get the same sort of service. This is normal, it's easier to wire up a city then the country..but your house/property taxes are a lot cheaper out there too.. everyone really pays for it somehow, that's the trade-off. You want fast dsl/cable and only pay $29/month, move to the city!
-b
Ok looking at the wireless costs most of Africa is not going to have a cell tower "every few hundred meters across the coverage area " In some areas the cell towers are closer to a 20 mile across or 300 square miles of land from a single tower.
When your talking about ongoing costs of wireless you speak in terms of "spectrum rental" and "upgrade cycles" but they don't apply to developing nations. Spectrum is effectively free when nobody wants it and there is little point in upgrading a system when they can start with the best teck the US has been using instead of jumping though all those past incarnations.
Now in highly populated areas the cost of wired service drops but it's a lot cheaper to use wireless when the population density is 1000's of people per squire mile than it is to maintain wires to everybody's house. You end up with a single tower with a satellite uplink or fiber line instead of 1000's of miles of copper just waiting to break.
Now inside of city's it's a good idea to lay down fiber so businesses can get access high speed networks, TV, and 10's or 100's of phone lines with a single instillation but in moderately populated areas a cell phone is a lot cheaper to setup and operate.
Cell towers work best when you have low talk time per user and or a sparsely populated area and landlines work best in densely populated areas with high talk time per user. Now from your personal experience which defines most of Africa better?
the 121ms one was going through 22 hops.
edinburgh - london - new york - chicago - denver
With the verizon wireless card has been pretty good. From a ski house at the bottom of the hill, I got a very usable almost-broadband like experience. In the city, the reception was worse than dialup. If you have great cell reception where you live and you're desparate then go for it. Its not suitable for gaming, though... -V
My take on various Inet connections...
DirecPC (one way version of DirecWay) has huge latency sucks for gaming but cool for downloading except when they FAP(?? rate limit) your ass or poor weather. Real cloudy skies = no connection...
ISDN barely okay for gaming but bad for downloading. Don't expect to beat any LPBs. Telco's love to overcharge for this as it's a "business" thing.
WiMax almost as good as cable modem but pricey. Usually high up front costs for antenna plus modem/router. Trees could pose a line of sight problem. Windy days could pose a problem with line of sight. (Water towers sway in the wind)
Cable best for downloading and gaming just be careful if you're uncapping your modem. Low up front costs, high speed, and better than DSL from what I hear. Comcast's DNS servers have been known to go down a lot so you'll need some backup DNS servers. I think the only thing that screws cable internet up is the dumb people working for the company. Cable is probably the most immune to weather problems.
Never used DSL or Cell phones. I expect the cell phone service is a gimmic right now so it's probably overpriced. DSL hasn't changed much from what I hear and with Comcast increasing their rate every so often DSL hasn't been able to keep up in terms of speed.
You make far more coherent points than the original respondent.
However I don't find population density is that smooth - it's not as if a country with a low overall density is that way because people have spaced themselves equidistantly (with some exceptions, and those are probably well suited for wireless).
Mostly outside the cities, at least from what I've seen, it's small but dense settlements, and then a smattering of more isolated houses and compounds.
I am not arguing against the use of wireless technologies to bridge the substantial distances between settlements, but just for the last mile. Some of my arguments are more to the general case of wireless vs wired last-mile and do not find great traction in this particular environment.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Just two cents from my own experience, I lived on a sailboat for much of last year. Have a Sprint PCS phone with "FutureDial SnapDialer" (I think, or the other way around), third party software that uses the phone as a modem. A mile or so out on the ocean (not too far) cell service is alright, and the data does in fact hit ~broadband speed. Of course, this is entirely contingent on whether or not you can get service. Giant downloads (Jehtro Tull - Thick as a Brick) still took time measurable in days to download, as service would pop in and out.
I wish there was an offer like that in my city.
That's exactly what I'm looking for as I move into my own appartment. I have a cell, so I don't need a landline and I don't want to pay $30/month for a phone line + $40 for dsl.
I saw the Sign, and it opened up my eyes
I concur, I had very high latency with Sprint PCS Vision. Plus... You could either pay $100 a month (IIRC) for their special PCMCIA card, OR you could just hook up a USB cable to your phone and use it as a modem, for no additional charge beyond Vision ($10 a month, at the time I signed up). Except, they decided you weren't supposed to do that anymore; except, they did nothing to prevent it, and told people it was OK as long as it wasn't "too much"; except "too much" was never defined.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I can't say about everywhere, but I'm 120mi from the nearest big city and about 50mi from an interstate and Cingular has already swapped all of their towers to GSM (my old phone stopped working and I was forced to upgrade). As a bonus however I can now get 120kbps wireless internet way out here in the boonies(however this isn't really that impressive, the cable company already has 5Mbps cable available...) :)
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
I don't know who modded this informative. It's patently untrue. I live in a rural area and there are quite a few new cell towers around here. There are plenty of places that get a good cell phone signal but are too far from the CO for DSL. Also, sometimes the problem is not that the copper can not take data, but that older switching equipment is not capable. Our phone provider did not want to replace the old switches, so DSL was not offered until the our area was bought by another company.
Having said that, I have no experience with cell modem cards.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
I've tested cellular cards from Sprint, Verizon, and Nextel. The Sprint cards had the most consistent coverage in Raleigh, around North Carolina, and in the dozen or so places we've tested them in other states (usually major metropolitan areas.) However, the Nextel card RAWKS as far as speed--but we're in the test market for their super high-speed connection. I get 1.5M easily with the Nextel card. Too bad the testing ends in a month or so, and the cards will go away. The very COOLEST accessory you can get with these cards is a Junxion box. Plug the PCMCIA card in one end and get WiFi out the other. I've only tested them with the Sprint cards, but they're FLAWLESS. Turn on WiFi on your laptop and it connects to the Junxion box, which then connects with the cellular card before you even know it! I drove from Raleigh to Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute way up in the NC mountains. We didn't drop the signal even once on any major highway, and kept it further up into the mountains than I'd expected to. Since we were broadcasting free WiFi for a few hundred feet everywhere we went, we called it "peace driving". If someone warchalks my minivan I'm gonna be PISSED!
Watch the biling carefully. I'm about to cancel my data plan not because I don't use it, but because I've been consistently over billed. Rogers Wireless changed me to a more expensive plan without my authorization, credited my only partially for their mistake, ignored my request to change the plan last month, and basically refuses to discuss it with me (their managers never call back)
Also, watch your usage. The rogers plans are extemely steep if you go over. Going over by one meg can cost more than the difference to the next plan. You need to pick your plan at the start of the month, but get your usage at the end.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Wow; that is one hell of an obscure reference. I salute you, sir! I'd put you on my friends list if you weren't Anonymous Coward.
Wow, from your posts, it's readily evident that your ePenis is so big that you can treat everything else as being the same and inferior. All bow before raju1kabir's mighty ePenis++
Where to start....
Sprint offers a PCMCIA card ($170 in retails stores, got mine for $18 on ebay) that needs a singal from one of their towers, but is 'like' broadband in performance for $80 for unlimited, $40 for limited. But... using a third party "data link' cable from your specific model Sprint phone (in my case, the Samsung A500) to your laptop, and creating a dial up connection to #777 will get you on their high speed wireless network as well for the price of Vision ($10/month) and I get an average of 25KB (that's KBYTES, not Kbits) in my town. My brother who lives in the boonies uses the exact same set up (Samsung A500 with SnapDail data cable) and also gets 25KB. It will all depend on if you are near enough to a tower, but it works.
PS: Sprint knows about this process, and one rep I saw quoted in Pop. Mech (or Pop Sci, I forget) in the April or May issue said that it does not violate the terms of your aggreement.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
very informative, thanks.
[The following is based on ISDN in the US - I know the rest of the world works differently]
ISDN is a dialup technology. Almost all of the major wholesale dialup networks have equipment that doesn't care if the incoming call is ISDN or analog. Unless you are talking to a local ISP that still thinks it is 1996, there should be no surcharge for ISDN. The experience of the ISP comes into play if you want to bond both ISDN channels to get 128k up/down and/or want BandWidth on Demand to automatically connect the second channel only when it is needed (and to release theh 2nd channel if you pick up the phone or an incoming call arrives).
The hard/expensive part is getting the ISDN line from the phone company. ISDN will work out to 35,000 feet without doing special magic (digital repeaters, etc...). Since ISDN is being pushed aside for DSL, finding someone in the phone company who can place the order and knows the correct tariff may take time.
Also, the tariffs vary widely depending on where you live and whether the phone company will consider you to be a business user. An ISDN circuit consist of 2 64kb channels (+signaling channel). If you have two phone lines today, the ISDN can replace both and wind up being comparable in cost to what you pay now... IF the local phone company does not impose a per minute connect charge.
The technology the parent is alluding to is called DoV (Data over Voice). The call is set up as if it is a voice call, and once it is connected, the modems agree that they are both digital devices and switch to data mode. Voice calls on residential ISDN do not normally carry a per minute charge for local calls. Note that the definition of "local" for ISDN may be different than for analog.
Some local ISPs will also support ISDN dialback - they buy the T1 from the telco, and they don't have to pay a per minute charge - so your ISDN modem dials in, provides its callerID, hangs up and the ISP dials you back. The recipient of a ISDN call does not pay a per minute charge.
ISDN connects almost immediately - there is no analog squawking to determing line quality, negotiate v.90 bit rates, etc... if you are paying per minute charges, having a short idle timeout is much less annoying than it is for analog.
Here are more details for the curious:
http://www.findanisp.com/isdn.php
As others have alluded to, don't overlook "Fixed Wireless". If you have an ISP in line of sight (REAL line of sight, not almost LOS)... This uses 802.11 either on licensed or unlicensed spectrum with parabolic antennas. This can get you DSL speeds out 10-15 miles, depending on terrain. Typical cost for residential use is about $300-500 for installation, and then monthly fees comparable to DSL or cable.
IDSL is DSL over ISDN. Since it is a dedicated point to point connection, there is no need for the signalling channel, so the entire 144 Kb bandwidth is available (vs 128kb for dialup ISDN).
Since IDSL is basically a leased circuit, it ties you into the specific ISP where the other end is terminated. Typical monthly charges run $100-$150, plus substantial setup charges.
Be careful when dicussing ISDN in US vs non US contexts. Because of the way ISDN was deployed in the US, it is not compatible with European equipement. Most houses do not have the required 6 wires to every jack that "real" ISDN requires, so the functionality that is typically present in a European phone system at the telco handoff point is instead incorporated in the end-user device. Translation: Don't buy an ISDN modem (actually called a terminal adapter since it isn't doing analog modulation) from eBay if you are in the US and the equipment was not built for the US. Adapters are available, but that increases the cost and is another potential failure point.
Also, note that if you connect the incoming ISDN line to your computer using one of the cheap cards, and then plug the phone into the ISDN card, the
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
I pay $29.99 for 1.5 - 3.0 Mbps
-gjr
Foo to all of that, I just carry a 7 mile cat5 cable everywhere I go, with repeaters every 200M
works fine for me, kind of a tripping hazard though
-JP
Living in the boonies sucks.
I recall from my younger years in Wellington some cases of thieves stealing old heavy copper pipes from the guttering of old homes.
I do agree though regarding contractors. There was an argument between some workers and their foreman near a previous residence where they were laying some cable TV cable. The workers took their frustration out on the cable before they covered and cemented over the hole.
3G max's at 2Mb. That is one terminal using bandwidth in a controlled test setting. 4 "phones" wouldn't work on an 8mbit hub. Attenuation and other laws of physics would restrict it to maybe 3. Probably 2 in the best conditions. That is assuming a "phone" can pull 2Mbps. which won't happen. Take a look at WLAN connection speeds that are advertised vs. real, especially with multiple users and see what the difference is. Point being, if you are just looking for access, not major downloading, uploading. EV-DO from Verizon will work fine, assuming they have it in your coverage area. It is still better than 56k through AOL.. God forbid!!!
The best thing that you can do is get a phone from sprintpcs w/internet. Buy the pcsync cord and software and hook it up to your USB port. Trus me it is great. The cord is around 60 bucks but the internet is fast when the phone is used as a modem. Cheep too. $15.00/month. 3 to 5 times faster then dial up at $20.00/month. Make sure that you can get service at your house first. Good Luck. Coy
CoyBurnes@cableone.net