Matt Meiser
12-18-2006, 10:22 PM
Since we moved to our house 3 years ago we've been surviving with Hugesnet/Direcway satellite internet. The service hasn't been nearly as good as the cable service we had at our previous house and I've been waiting for one of the three nearby cable provider, 2 nearby wireless internet, or Verizon to come to our immediate area.
A few weeks ago I noticed that Sprint had expanded their wireless broadband coverage in our area and showed that we were right on the edge of the covered area. So, I borrowed the demo EV-DO card from a local Sprint store this afternoon to try out. Right now the card is installed in my work laptop with its connection shared using Windows ICS. The performance is incredibly better than the satellite connection. The seat of the pants feeling is much better with minimal latency compared to the satellite connection. In side by side test to the same speed test site, I was getting between 600 and 1100kbs down and 120-140kbps up. Now for those of you with land based connections that may not sound very good, but with satellite, I was getting 1/2 of those numbers on the satellite. And uploading the attached pictures took only a couple seconds compared to my usual upload time of maybe 20 seconds in the past.
I also tried out VPN which actually worked and worked as well as any time I've used it from a hotel. And my wife tried out a Citrix connection to her work and found that it performed well enough that she could key in journal entries--before the lag made it so bad it was painful to use to even just look something up.
Needless to say we are signing a contract tomorrow to get our own card (with a 30-day money back guarantee.) If it works well in the long term test, we'll be cancelling our Hughesnet service. The monthly cost is the same as our satellite service so it won't save anything. Linksys makes a Sprint-approved router that hosts the PC card which I'll be ordering tomorrow as well.
A few weeks ago I noticed that Sprint had expanded their wireless broadband coverage in our area and showed that we were right on the edge of the covered area. So, I borrowed the demo EV-DO card from a local Sprint store this afternoon to try out. Right now the card is installed in my work laptop with its connection shared using Windows ICS. The performance is incredibly better than the satellite connection. The seat of the pants feeling is much better with minimal latency compared to the satellite connection. In side by side test to the same speed test site, I was getting between 600 and 1100kbs down and 120-140kbps up. Now for those of you with land based connections that may not sound very good, but with satellite, I was getting 1/2 of those numbers on the satellite. And uploading the attached pictures took only a couple seconds compared to my usual upload time of maybe 20 seconds in the past.
I also tried out VPN which actually worked and worked as well as any time I've used it from a hotel. And my wife tried out a Citrix connection to her work and found that it performed well enough that she could key in journal entries--before the lag made it so bad it was painful to use to even just look something up.
Needless to say we are signing a contract tomorrow to get our own card (with a 30-day money back guarantee.) If it works well in the long term test, we'll be cancelling our Hughesnet service. The monthly cost is the same as our satellite service so it won't save anything. Linksys makes a Sprint-approved router that hosts the PC card which I'll be ordering tomorrow as well.