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Wireless Networking Hardware Technology

Tetherless Wireless 157

Posted by Zonk from the i'm-a-wanderer dept.
TolkiEinstein writes "Here's an interesting tidbit from the NY Times on Verizon's new EV-DO network they've dubbed simply, BroadbandAccess Plan. A mere $80/mo. gets you wireless access over Verizon's 3G network at "giddy" speeds of 400-700 kbps. True, that's not exactly breakneck, compared to my 2800-3400 kbps desktop connection. But, the fact that it's hotspot-free (tetherless) wireless access from major metropolitan areas should count for something. One negative is slow upload speeds of around 100 kbps."
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Tetherless Wireless

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  • Can someone explain to me? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kaosrain ( 543532 ) <root AT kaosrain DOT com> on Saturday June 25, 2005 @05:36AM (#12908198) Homepage
    Why is it that the download:upload speed ratios are almost always at least 2:1, and usually 3 or 4? Is it solely to deter servers/filesharing?

    • Re:Can someone explain to me? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Likely they want to have a markup to sell the more symmetrical upload speed to business accounts.

      No tecnhical reasons other than to maximize profits.

    • Re:Can someone explain to me? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <rednebnoom>> on Saturday June 25, 2005 @06:06AM (#12908245)
      It might be a "political" decision in some cases, but at least with ADSL it seems to be technically motivated. See the Wikipedia article on ADSL [wikipedia.org]. (Note: Maybe the article is false, I probably wouldn't notice.) When ADSL was first introduced in a large scale, P2P file sharing wasn't much of an issue, anyway, distribution was pretty much exclusively client/server, so limiting it for "political" reasons wouldn't have made much sense.
    • It's because the same companies you are buying your service from are also in the content distribution business. Your content is a THREAT!

    • Re:Can someone explain to me? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      All "the Man" conspiracy theories aside, most customers have a decidedly asymmetric user profile: A few big outgoing mails and photo uploads every now and then, and a lot of websurfing and downloading all the time. A symmetric connection is a waste of resources. You and I may have different user profiles, but ISP offers are for the majority of users, not for the relatively small percentage of people who know what to do with upstream bandwidth.
    • When Time Warner first opened cable modem service, I had 5 mbps download and 1 mbps upload. It didn't last long before Time Warner lowered their upload speeds. The city I lived in was entirely fiber. The reason the uploads were capped were to prevent running businesses at home. Let's face it, at $40/month, cable modem service was the optimal choice for small business.

      Now Time Warner offers the higher upload speeds as part of their bBusiness package". But the costs are also a lot higher. I'll still miss run
    • Any connection has a finite amount of bandwidth that must be shared between both directions of transfer.

      Most home users (or rather, those that don't run servers or filesharing, which was once most of them, I don't know about now) would rather have faster download speeds and slower upload. It just works better for web browsing, e-mail reading, and most other things the average user wants to do with their Internet connection.

      This explains most of the asymmetries involved. The only one *not* explained is t

      • The reason RE: 56K (Score:3, Informative)

        by CarrionBird ( 589738 )
        It is related to the way in which they get 56K out of a POTS line (it wasn't supposed to be possible). The way I understand it, they send data digitally (PCM) to your modem. They can do this because the lines are all digital until they get close to your house. It only works one way, and only if enough of the path between your house and the ISP is digital.

        Also, is it 28.8 upstream or 33.6?

      • Absolutely true about broadband upstream/downstream.
        Although, many people are using enough upstream these days that saturation is a problem - TCP actually chokes in both directions when either is saturated.
        This is because every packet is ACKnowledged - and there is a maximum window for sending packets without receiving an ack.

        (So P2P users beware - ask your ISP for symmetrical!)

        As for the POTS modem, the upstream isn't seperate from the downstream. When modems negotiate, they pick different frequenc

        • The thing is, is that the ACK packets are much smaller than the data packets, or at least, that's the way it's supposed to be. I'd expect this to be at least 5:1 size ratio, if not something more like 100:1. The simple fact of that matter is, is that you don't need that much upstream unless you are sending real data.
    • EVDO uses a highspeed downlink and a low speed uplink. In fact, the uplink is the first generation of 3G CDMA, called 1xRTT, and it capped at about 144Kbps. So it you're getting 100 on the uplink that is pretty decent for wireless.

      So this is not Verizon's choice, it is a limitation of the technology and equipment. The next version o EVDO will have higher uplink speeds.
    • It's to stop people from running any type of server. An ISP will usually have a higher priced plan for that.

    • Re:Can someone explain to me? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Myself ( 57572 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @08:03AM (#12908512) Journal
      In this case, it has to do with spectrum and equipment. It's easy for the tower to blast out a strong signal with tons of data, and each mobile to hear it. The only limit here is spectrum allocation.

      In the reverse direction, the signal from the mobile is much more tightly power-limited, so if there's too much data per unit of energy, the tower can't hear it above the noise. The solution if you can't yell, is to speak slowly.

      For wireline services, it's murkier. The noise budget of a DSLAM has a few things in common with the wireless situation, but in most cases, the upload could go much faster than they sell, and yes, it's a political decision rather than a technical one. With cable, the upload is a shared channel, so they're fairly conservative in what they allocate. They should allow more upload when the network is busy, but that would take effort on their part, and only help a few percent of the customer base.

      Here's what's funny: The EV-DO tower equipment is served by T1 circuits, which are symmetric. I understand using T1s for the voice stuff, since it's delay-sensitive, but they could've saved a bundle by using DSL for the data. The equipment is capable of it too, just in a nonobvious way. I bet it was never even considered.
      • Incase nobody else noticed, if you look at your T1 smartjacks they say 'HDSL' on them. (You may notice some say DSL-1 DSL-2)... You can do 1.5Mb/s on a single pair in short distances with the proper HDSL cards installed in your smartjack(s). This helps you if you're close to their fiber hut/SLC.

        Specifically my home is served by a T1 going over HDSL4 which gets longer range/distance but it consumes two pairs.

        • Yep, that just adds to the irony factor. All they're buying for the 10x price difference is the classification of the circuit as HiCap in case it goes down.

          Now really, since cells overlap a little, one site can go down without that much impact. I understand ordering T1s for the important sites, the ones near high-profile customers and stuff, but the average suburban site would do just fine on a cheaper circuit. I don't know how much of their operating costs go to paying for circuits, but I bet it's a signi
    • Simply the technology they use. Most people want to download information so it is more efficient to have bigger download channels than uploads. The telcos only have som much bandwidth to play with and they paid a lot of money for it.

      AFAIK The other 3G system W-CDMA has better upload speeds but slower downloads (Until HSDA arrives later this year in trials).

      --------
      As an aside EV-DO is also know as EVolution - Download Only in the WCDMA camp for its crap uplink speed.

  • Some of us would be happy with a 400-700 kbps pipe in our home. Ass.

    • Re:Some of us... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Some of us would be happy with a 400-700 kbps pipe in our home.

      Yeah, you say now that you'd be happy with just that but if we give it to you then next thing you'll want running water.
    • I am the happy owner of a 20Mb-1Mb pipe (so for you US slashdotters, it's 2400kB/s-128kB/s pipe in metrics...) for 29.99euros/month.

      I never was able to go faster than 1.4MB/s down (thats 11200 kbps), as few sources can provide such a fast stream, and from the fact that anything under 3 Mo is too short to even make a blimp on my netspeed applet...

      Hey you know what, you want fast DSL at a nice price, come and move to old Europe...

      Just don't stop at the UK caus'they took to the US system of bloatedoverpri
      • you are such an idiot.

        On my NJ home I had a 3Mb/s downstream and 512Kb/s upstream. Time warner upgraded it recently to 6Mb/s download though and 768Kb/s upstream.

        If anything though, I prefer my School connection, 10MB/s downstream and 10MB/s upstream all for $30,000 per year!

    • And some of us would be happy with 400-700 kbps pipe in our ass. Oh, did I say that out loud?

    • A friend of mine lived in an area that didn't have DSL yet, but he could get the ~56kbps Metricom service, and was the only customer near his nearest Metricom lamppost, so he usually got pretty full bandwidth for his household of four people. Sure beat dialup.

  • uplink - downlink (Score:2, Interesting)

    by caluml ( 551744 )
    For me, it's uplink speed that's important. I could upgrade my 512k connection to 2Mb/s, but the uplink would stay at 256k. The more that downlink outweighs uplink, the more it prevents home users from starting sites, and leaves the content of the web in the hands of the large companies with the outgoing bandwidth.

    • Re:uplink - downlink (Score:5, Insightful)

      by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @06:16AM (#12908267) Homepage
      The more that downlink outweighs uplink, the more it prevents home users from starting sites, and leaves the content of the web in the hands of the large companies with the outgoing bandwidth.

      It also mitigates damage due to zombie PCs and protects the backbone connection from massive saturation due to user stupidity, p2p file sharing and other taskes.
    • You get get hosting space on a linux box for $3.95 a month. And you don't have to worry about leaving your computer on, the cable connection dropping out every other week, and all the complexities necessary of setting up and maintaining a web server. Not all of these services are large companies. I hosted a server at home for many years. Then I started buying hosting, and realized how much easier it made my life.
    • WTF? If you want to run a website, pay $3/month or whatever to get a hosting service. There's absolutely no need to drive up the costs for everyone just so a few people can run websites from home.
  • What benefits do I get with 3G over wireless/wifi access?

    I rarely encounter a wifi hotspot that is that slow, and certainly the cost per month for a commercial wifi spot is not as bad; my neighborhood coffee shop near the Albertson's around Fair Oaks blvd (Sacramento) charges way less than that for much faster service.

    At such high prices and low speeds I am not convinced that this 3G thing won't jump the shark.
    • But, the fact that it's hotspot-free (tetherless) wireless access from major metropolitan areas should count for something.

      The 3G phones DON'T NEED a hotspot. It's for people that don't have that sort of convenient place to go to.
    • Its unlikely that 3G will jump the shark because the tellcos are bent on moving all voice traffic to VOIP over 3G. The current EVDO is just the first step.
    • The footprint of your typical wireless hotspot is a couple of hundred feet, at maximum. And there's not reason to expect that, outside of a few areas in some towns (like Newbury Street in Boston, or Essex Street in downtown Salem MA) that have sponsored WiFi meshes, you will have continuous service. So you're very limited as to where you have access.

      With EV-DO, your hotspot is the entire metropolitan area. And you still get better than modem speeds even in places where the higher speeds are unavailable.
      • Yep! In my last job, I did on-site computer service and this would have been VERY useful. Nothing like showing up to someone's house who simply tells you on the phone "My computer doesn't work right. I don't know much about it.", only to find they need about 5 or 6 device drivers that they lost the CD for, and they only have dial-up internet access. (The average Lexmark all-in-one printer driver download is over 200MB nowdays, don't forget!)

        The wi-fi hot spots aren't always very reliable either. I've

    • What benefits do I get with 3G over wireless/wifi access?

      As was said by someone else, the benefit is that it's available over a much wider area. I'm using EV-DO right now from home, and there isn't a wifi access point I can find to do that.

    • I don't have to be a leech, war driving, looking for an open AP. In fact, I can be on the train or driving and it works great. If you're looking for cheap, duh - this isn't it. If freedom of movement is important and downtime is expensive, this is a must and it's very useable.

  • Big Deal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vought ( 160908 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @05:56AM (#12908226)
    I had 3-400kbps wireless access all over the Bay Area in 2001.

    It was called Ricochet...and no, it didn't succeed, because they charged too much for the all-you-can eat plan. How much, you ask?

    $80.00 per month.

    Another reason Ricochet failed was the FUD spread by the cellcos. They told everyone who would listen that 3G access at 300-500kbps would be ready in 2002 at $25.00/month.

    Guess that didn't happen, hunh?
    • the bullshit 20% actually delivered that the SPRINT CDMA2000 1XRTT ended up being (some 20-30kbps on a good day with the rare burst at 70kbps) AND if it were $40/month, I'd drop my broadband cabloe and go with the EVDO. As it is, I can live with those few times that a WiFi connex isn't available.bb
    • I personally have used the Verizon EVDO service in Baltimore and New York. In the areas of the East Coast I've been where I don't get full EVDO speeds, you can at least connect at slow speeds over Verizon's nationwide network and do simple work. Big difference between that and a tiny little area plan like Richochet. I even get a strong EVDO signal here in the suburbs of Baltimore ~15 miles out of the center of the network where I live, beyond where DSL reaches even.
    • Yeah, Ricochet only advertised 128k, what's with that? From every report I've found, it was almost never below 200k.

      Ricochet's indoor penetration was also second to none. With the radios blasting out a full watt at 900MHz, it would go through anything, and with 5 poletops per square mile in covered areas, you were always right under one. The modems were able to "gearshift" between modulations on the fly, to work around interference or signal fade. From the blistering speed of 64QAM to the bulletproof penet

    • Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Insightful)

      by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 )

      It was called Ricochet...and no, it didn't succeed, because they charged too much for the all-you-can eat plan. How much, you ask? $80.00 per month.

      And even $80.00 a month wasn't enough for Ricochet to be able to do it at a profit. The cell phone companies are in a much better position here. They could handle one or two users per cell phone tower with essentially no additional operating costs. As the number of users ramps up, so will their operating costs, but they still don't have anywhere near the co

      • $80/mo was plenty for Ricochet to turn a profit, if they'd had users. Unfortunately, the service was barely advertised, and never to the right market. In many of their covered areas, they had under 1000 customers when the service shut down.

        Operating costs for a cellular network are absurdly high compared to Ricochet. First, they only needed one site every 10 square miles or so, compared to every 2-3 for most cell networks, and denser in the city. Second, the equipment at the site used a lot less power, too

        • $80/mo was plenty for Ricochet to turn a profit, if they'd had [enough] users.

          Well sure, but $80/month is enough for the cell phone companies to turn a profit even with just a few dozen users.

          Operating costs for a cellular network are absurdly high compared to Ricochet.

          If you haven't already built the network, and you're not already operating it anyway.

          Parent poster, I'd really like you to explain the "essentially no additional operating costs" comment regarding cellular networks. Costs scale with

    • $80 is a lot... and the speeds aren't there totally. But progress usually starts with an overpriced product that initially appeals to business users and the overly-comfortable, economically speaking. When demand rises and price-point comes down, it will pick up. Saturation also has something to do with it - major metropolitans are nice, but the entire breadth of my cell phone service area is better. So _I_ won't be an early adapter, but it's nice to see things still moving forward.

  • EV-DO works great! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by snub ( 140826 )
    I use one of the older generation Sprint AirCards (until my contract expires) but one of my employees uses EV-DO. Recently we were doing an online presentation using a system similar to NetMeeting. He stopped along the side of the highway outside Washington DC and participated in the session at full speed. No one could discern any lag or tell that he wasn't on a tethered connection.
    • Verizion has a history of making sure things work very well in Washington DC. I guess this is to convince the .gov that they are serving the public intrest. When I can get it in rural CO with the same speed you see (and remember, I pay more for my cell service due to a "High Cost Fund Surcharge"), I'll be impressed.

      I just want to make a phone call in downtown Winterpark.

      • Hell I'm still waiting for good service in my apartment in boulder
      • Verizon has this deal with the Metro board (the org that runs the DC subway) for "exclusivity" rights since 1993 or so. The original 8 year deal was supposed to give Metro an $8 million emergency backup communications system. But they renewed the agreement for, like 16 years, for pretty much nothing compared to what other places like NYC's Port Authority gets for allowing telecoms to run cells in the Lincoln tunnel and such.

        So basically, if you live and work in DC and take the Metro, Verizon's the only c

  • No News Here (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sheesh, TFA is an ad for Verizon masquerading as news.

    The real news will be to the folks who actually buy the service: speeds will eventually suck. People: cellular networks are shared so the bandwidth is only available so long as nobody else is using it. The only way Verizon et al can be profitable is to oversell the hell out of the thing. There's a wakeup call coming for those who think the high bandwidth will be there at any given point in the future.

    • Yes, the backhaul is shared, just like any other network connection - at some point, it's gotta get aggregated.

    • Absolutely right. EV-DO has a 2MBPS shared channel, per sector, for all the downstream data. (I don't know whether more carriers can be added with the spectrum they have allocated.) That's fine and dandy for rural or suburban use, but once you get into dense urban environments, it's very hard to put enough bits per second per square meter to satisfy the userbase, with this technology.

      The moral of the story? Don't live downtown.

      • That's fine and dandy for rural or suburban use, but once you get into dense urban environments, it's very hard to put enough bits per second per square meter to satisfy the userbase, with this technology.

        The moral of the story? Don't live downtown.

        More like, if you're downtown, don't use EV-DO. You'd be much better off with a wifi solution in an extremely dense urban environment. If this becomes a real problem, I'm sure there will be dual wifi/somekindofcellphonetechnology card which can automatica

        • There isn't already, and I'm not sure there's a market force to create such a thing, but you could do it easily enough in software if your machine can run both interfaces at once.

          What I'm really waiting for is a phone that can switch between cellular networks and voip over wifi, along with some sort of back-end to enable those handoffs. It would solve the coverage problem in dense urban environments, and in upscale NIMBY neighborhoods where tower placement is a problem.

          • What I'm really waiting for is a phone that can switch between cellular networks and voip over wifi, along with some sort of back-end to enable those handoffs.

            I'd like a nice, small, low power consumption bridge which could go between ED-VO and wifi. Then I could just keep it in my car, and use a wifi phone exclusively.

            • You mean like this? [slashdot.org]

              (Yet another reason TFA was redundant... slashdot's not only covered VZW's EVDO rollout before, but the previous mention included something USEFUL to do with it.)
        • There is - thursday in the WSJ Walter Mossberg reviewed a EVDO/Wifi phone. This being a Verizon product, there naturally is no enabled functionality to use this phone as a modem. As always, Verizon is evil.
    • Ok, first is the hype of introducing a new buzz word. That's annoying and I too am sick of PR pretending to be news. But if you're complaining about this, you shouldn't be reading the technology news anyway. Most of it is rewrites of PR wire.

      However, there is news here. They're announcing that there's anywhere you go wireless internet access at reasonable speeds for less than selling a lung. I've used it and it's pretty damn useful and cool. There's been and need and demand for this for a few years,
    • Sorry for catching tyhe late flight into this thread, but its only just recently I've actually looked at phone stuff anyways. Here goes;

      UMTS is the 3G the rest of the world will be using and is most distinctly the future; EV-Do can kiss off. It just wont scale to multi users. Cingular is trying to move all its cell phoens over to 850 mhz to open up 1900 for UMTS. Deployment has in Atlanta and Chicago initially, with a 2006 rollout. Cingular is dumping a TON of cash into this rollout; they need to. Ve
  • Hey, thats _SMALL_ I'm sitting here, waithing for my adsl contract to expire, so that I can get my Personal fibre turned on(4/4 symetric, althogh they provide 10/10 & 50/25mb too).
    Digging the ditch was a lot of work tho...

  • From a former employee (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChaosMt ( 84630 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @07:00AM (#12908360) Homepage
    I'm not giving away any trade secrets here, but I did get to try this out for free and see what I thought. I was on the data side of things, so I don't have any perspectives from the cell network or sales side of the house.

    The article (you did read it, didn't you?) says EVDO is on the 3G network and then cites 1xCDMA. Well, I wasn't under them impression that it was really richochet rising from the ashes. I know it is more than just bonding two cell sessions together like Cingular or like "National Access" and it's not using hot spots like T-mobile or others. I can't be sure, so I'll let others correct me.

    What I can provide is real world sysadmin testing. First, non-PCs are not supported, but often they work better. A coworker got it to work under linux, but I don't know the details. They gave use the cheapest one, the aircard, and I slapped it in my powerbook, and I was on the net in less than 10 seconds - really. You wil NOT have this experience on windows. Much of the "speed" comes for all sorts of compression and caching tricks. On a PC, after three reboots, you'll be up and going. For web browsing on a PC, it's deceptively fast - Very acceptable. Slower on my mac (no client caching and compression), but faster than a modem.

    However, what really counts to me is ssh anc scp sessions. The network optimization tricks do not handle encryption very well and the true speeds show themselves. It's still much better than modem or using my cell phone for emergency access. It will be laggy at times. This is where signal strength matters. In Orange county California, I every where I went had fair coverage. It was usually local objects that would be in the way of getting a good signal. For example, sitting in the cube around file cabinets or in colos surrounded by equipment would effect the signal.

    If you're ever on-call, I'd say this is a must have just for the freedom of movement it gives you. Like I said, ssh and scp are laggy, but workable. X sessions and vnc aren't as snappy as you might dream about, but they are workable and better than the days on modems. A windows cohort of mine lives off this service. He gets emergency calls, and pulls out his laptop and gets to work. He hasn't had any problem in this area.
    • You think it's laggy, but you haven't tried Nextel's Packetstream data offering. It's been around for years, and I've used it since 2002, so it's not really a fair comparison, but oh lord! Round-trip times approaching 3000ms REALLY make SSH a pain in the ass.

      EV-DO is a dream to use in comparison. I got to play with the Detroit network during installation (it's currently being fine-tuned before they open it to the public) and the 150ms lag I experienced was quite acceptable.

      Also, the damn "Vortex" compress

  • Verizon and timetables (Score:4, Funny)

    by VGR ( 467274 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @07:04AM (#12908370)
    From the article:
    Verizon says that the rollout has just begun, and that by the end of this year, half the American population will be EV-DOable.
    For those not fluent in Verizon-speak, that means by 2015 half the American population will be EV-DOable.
  • It appears that this mobile service cost about 5x that of wired DSL. 400-700 kpbs is roughly comparable to currently available basic residential DSL where you can get 384 k-1.5 Mbps down / 128-384 kbps up for about $15/month.
    • Millions and millions of people are outside of hard wired xDSL or cable access areas, let alone "wifi" coffee shop access points. There are no alternatives currently except very expensive laggy satellite service for anything resembling broadband. This service is for those areas. It's a humongous untapped market and they will probably do well with it would be my guess
      • I'd agree. $80/mo. is steep, when most people are probably already paying at least $30-50/mo. on their cell plan. Curious, what does satellite bb cost?
        • 5-600 dollars and up to a thousand for the hardware, then I think around 90 a month or so for the service, but I haven't looked for a few months either. There are also some new players getting into the sat broadband field so maybe prices will drop now.

          That intitial start up cost is the main reason I haven't gone for it yet. Well that and it's windows only so far, according to the websites I have visitied.

          Just for rural dialup now I am paying around 80 clams, that's for the landline and two ISPs. I use two
    • $15/mo eh? Is this Verizon? AFAIK Verizon's cheapest plan is $30/mo. (They have a 3 month intro special for $20/mo but that's temporary). Where might I find out about a $15/mo plan?

    • Comparible in terms of bandwidth, and that's about it.

      As for price, DSL is about $55/month if you don't already have a phone line.

  • Sure, this is cool if you live in one of the major metropolitan areas covered. I live less than 20 miles from NYC and EVDO isn't available here. So if you're in an area covered and you don't have access to real broadband, this is a win. Otherwise, I'd personally stick with the tried and true cablemodem or (gasp) DSL link. Also, EVDO!=3G. It's more like 2.75G.
    • Nope, CDMA EV-DO = 3G...

      WCDMA (or UMTS or 3GSM, names used to reduce the confusion between WCDMA and CDMA) has a maximum speed of 384Kbps. CDMA EV-DO has a maximum speed of 2Mbps.

      Average on WCDMA (or "3G" using the wrong name) is 250Kpbs. Average on CDMA EV-DO is 500Kbps.

  • Verizon EVDO compared to Covad DSL in n. Virginia (Score:5, Informative)

    by expo1892 ( 882252 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @08:11AM (#12908541) Homepage

    Okay, here's an hour and a half of research into my bandwidth (on a Saturday morning):

    • Verizon PC 5220 card, no booster antenna: 158 kbps
      • 7 trials
      • high 677, low 39
      • standard deviation 216 kbps
    • Verizon PC 5220 card, with booster antenna: 485 kbps
      • 7 trials
      • high 772, low 51
      • standard deviation 292 kbps
    • Covad DSL: 472 kpbs
      • 7 trials
      • high 607, low 381
      • standard deviation 74 kbps

    The Verizon PC 5220 card is in a PowerBook. The Covad DSL is plugged into a Power Mac. The laptop performance was measured lying in bed, next to my sleeping wife.

    Coverage is pretty good for me. My wife drove us from north Alexandria to Fair Oaks Mall out in Fairfax, I was surfing the web all the way.

    Yeah, the slow upload won't let you run a server, but lots of companies provide webhosting, some for little money. Works for me.

    Notes:

    1. I researched and bought the EVDO plan at http://www.evdoinfo.com/ [evdoinfo.com].
    2. Bandwidth was measured using "CNET.com - Internet Services - BandWidthMeter Results" ( http://reviews.cnet.com/Bandwidth_meter/7004-7254_ 7-0.html [cnet.com], 2005-06-25T07:40/P1H).
    3. Calculation of standard deviation was done at http://invsee.asu.edu/srinivas/stdev.html [asu.edu].

    (end notes)

    Wife's in the shower. Time to go make French Toast now!

    • There is one other drawback, though.

      Pinging www.slashdot.org [66.35.250.151] with 32 bytes of data:

      Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=290ms TTL=45
      Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=262ms TTL=45
      Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=282ms TTL=45
      Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=268ms TTL=45

      Try that from your DSL connection. (I would, but I just moved to a new apartment a month ago and they still haven't set up the DSL.

    • Your Covad circuit doesn't look blazingly fast, but that's typically a function of your distance to the telco office. It's probably also asymmetric, with slower upstream than downstream. Is the EVDO link symmetric speeds?

      Also, somebody commented about latency and jitter. Aside from any issues about overloading the air channel and fixing it with queuing, measurements like that are often random and large because routers are not very good at responding to pings, especially when they're busy - ping response

  • As a developer of this system (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The carrier is *shared* - that "highspeed" connection will slow down to a crawl once enough users get onto the network unless VZW adds carriers. Each carrier is designed to handle around 48 active users.

  • ...Just got a Treo 650, which provides level 10 EDGE, and I get roughly 144Kbit speeds...and for $20/month unlimited. Pssh for PalmOS just got an upgrade, which added Zlib compession. Now my Treo is (almost) as useful as my Powerbook when it comes to being on call.
    • It's nice to get blazingly fast bandwidth to a handheld device, but unless it's got a hard disk bigger than 40GB and you're running BitTorrent, it's fundamentally really low usage for the wireless company. Many of the cellular companies that offer $20 "unlimited" service will not let you use that service to connect your phone/handheld to a PC, or let you use it with a cellular card in your PC, or at least won't let you do it without charging you $80-100. So that phone with a Bluetooth in it isn't allowed
  • I think Verizon's service is only a temporary solution until 802.16/802.20 WiMax rolls out nationally some time in 2006.

    Unlike Verizon's service, WiMax is true broadband service that with a single antenna array could cover thousands of users up to line of sight. That means you only need a small number of antenna towers to cover a whole metropolitan area, and WiMax antennas placed along major highways and/or major passenger railroad corridors means high-speed Internet access from a moving vehicle or train.
    • 802.16 still has big problems with doppler shifting at automobile speeds and faster, and it also has multipath problems. It's fine if you are a stationary thing (like a house) with a nice antenna (and I think it will become a decent alternative to DSL and Cable Modem), but if you want to move around and use the network you might be disappointed.

      Also, the next revision of EVDO, EVDO Rev A, is starting to be integrated into devices and infrastructure, and has multi-megabit download and faster upload speeds

      • Actually, there are two variants of WiMax: 802.16 for fixed location users, and 802.20 for mobile users. The 802.20 spec (which should be finalized pretty soon) will address the issues of doppler shifting and multipath because it was designed specifically for use in any moving vehicle up to 250 km/h, according to what I've read in a couple of magazines.

  • One user's experience (Score:3, Informative)

    by eyegone ( 644831 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @09:43AM (#12908906)

    I work at a customer office, where they provide absolutely no network access, so some type of cellular data service is a must. I chose the Verizon service, because it was the only one that offered EV-DO at the time I signed up.

    In my experience, the service does generally live up to its advertising. I get anywhere from 400-700 kbps download speeds in the Dallas metropolitan area.

    I did have to turn off the web caching stuff. It appears to route all HTTP traffic to its compressing proxies, which makes all web servers that the proxies can't access (the ones on my employer's intranet) inaccessible.

    I am also unable to access cnnfn.com (CNN's financial news site). Can't ping it; connections just time out. I can get to the rest of the CNN site just fine, and I don't have any problem getting to cnnfn.com when I connected through any other network -- weird.

    The AirPrime PC 5220 card that Verizon uses appears to the OS as a OHCI-compatible USB controller with a single composite device attached. The two interfaces are simply USB serial devices; interface 0 acts like a modem (accepts standard AT commands), and interface 1 is apparently used for "diagnostic" information (signal strength, etc.).

    It's possible to force the Linux generic USB serial driver to recognize the card by specifying the vendor and product ID's as module parameters. Even better, Greg Kroah-Hartman whipped out an "airprime" driver that automatically recognizes the card as soon as its inserted. I'm not sure what trees the driver has made it into yet, but it was in Fedora Core 4 test 3.

    The big problem with this service, and apparently other cellular data services as well, is latency. Expect 300-700 ms ping times. It makes using SSH painful, X is completely unusable, and even web sites with lots of different elements can be slow to load. Anyone know why the latency is so bad with this service?
    • Try turning down your MTU. This is a common problem when packets get encapsulated somewhere along the link.

      Some sites disallow ICMP. This means that people can't use ICMP ("ping") to do malicious stuff, but it also means that the TCP Max MTU discovery doesn't work. Manually turning down your max MTU can solve this problem.

      I see this problem a lot on LANs that connect to the internet through an PPPoE connection. The PPPoE has a Max MTU of 1492 or so, because of the PPP encapsulation. The LAN has a


      • MTU is already down to 1300. (Required for our broken intranet.)

        I did just try pinging cnnfn.com from home (where I have no problem connecting to it with a browser) -- no dice, so it does look like they've got ICMP blocked. I hate it when people do that!

        I should have mentioned that I can connect to cnnfn.com by routing the traffic through a socks server on the company intranet. I'm pretty sure that something is just borked between Verizon and cnnfn's ISP. With ICMP turned off, though, it's pretty m
        • Ping is one of the many protocols that run on ICMP. Ping and ping-response are the most popular packet types, but the PMTU discovery is a different type of packet. It's possible to block pings and ping responses without blocking the packet types that make Path MTU Discovery work. Alas, it is not *necessary* to do the job right, and too many administrators and types of equipment blindly kill PMTU while trying to protect their security from ping-based attacks. But just because your pings got killed doesn'
  • Not exactly breakneck, and not exactly "3G". And not exactly what they promised. Sprint and Verizon promised EV-DO would run at minimum 140Kbps to 1.5Mbps and up. And they're delivering triple that minimum, and half that maximum. But at least it's >3x128Kbps, which means three good MP3 audio streams (including 110Kbps VoIP), and >320Kbps, which is OK for video, especially on a mobile "phone" screen. So they've finally achieved adequacy for $80:mo.

    It's not really 3G, which really starts at 1 or 1Mbps.
    • Nope. 3G as defined by the ITU is a cellular link that offers 384Kbps speeds. UMTS (or 3GSM or WCDMA, its other names) has a maximum speed of 384Kbps. It's the standard used by GSM operators, as an evolution of GPRS/EDGE. GPRS is 2.5G, EDGE is like 2.75G. UMTS/3GSM/WCDMA however requires a complete new network with radios, etc. Also, UMTS will have an average of 250Kpbs due to load, etc.

      CDMA 1xRTT is equivalent in speeds to EDGE, while CDMA 1xEV-DO is *much* faster than UMTS. It tops at 2Mbps (remember UMT
  • Have had it for two days now. Got it working straight away on my Linux laptop (no driver voodoo, it just looks like a USB serial port). BUT- the coverage, at least in Seattle metro, is "thin". Get outside the downtown district (which is drowning in 802.11 hotspots, both free and paid) and you are in a world of hurt to get an EV-DO signal. If you are lucky you get the fallback sub-dialup speed in many cases. In my Bellevue (big upscale suburb between Seattle and The Land of Evil) home, forget it. No si

  • I'll stick with my Blackberry and Cingular. For my usage the Blackberry is best (standing around waiting for flights knock out a few emails, etc.). Plus, I can hop of the plane in the UK and be online.

  • And all I had to buy was a cable to connect my phone (blue tooth users don't even need that). Yeah the bandwidth isn't always stellar, but hey, unlimited internet for 20 a month anywhere in the USA?

    Great deal for people who travel!
  • What about network latency. That is the thing that has kept me from using cell networks. You get decent speeds at 15-45k/s but with ping times around 2 seconds it really makes the connection perform more like sub dialup than isdn+.

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