My basic thoughts on EVDO and my 595U
If you are an avid reader of this blog you will already know the pain inflicted on me by Time Warner and their horrendous customer service. I won’t bore you with the details - suffice it to say that because Time Warner is so awful I needed a backup internet solution to take care of me when Road Runner (and I’ve got Premium service, no less) decides that it is completely fine for me to be without cable or internet for a week again. That could have resulted in me paying them lots more money for better service but thanks to their own incompetence I have the even better solution of paying Sprint $60/month and getting pretty good speeds that I can even take with me if I travel in the states.
If you are thinking of getting one o’ these cards (I got the Sierra Wireless Aircard 595U - the U stands for USB instead of PC Card or Express Card) and have a mac and don’t have easy internet access, you ought to read a little of the trials and tribulations I had getting the 595U EVDO thing working on my system. But having gotten everything up and running, I’m pretty happy with this as a backup.
I went with Sprint instead of Verizon because of Sprints easygoing attitude with what they’ll allow to happen over EVDO (anything as opposed to Verizon’s very rigid terms of service) and the fact that when Sprint says unlimited plan, they mean it and Verizon actually means 5GB. Sprint has their Rev A system out, which gets me very high theoretical speeds here in NYC, unfortunately in my apartment sitting on the inside of a shaft (a relatively big shaft, but a shaft nonetheless) I don’t get great connectivity. Maybe -115 to -90 dBm - which is pretty bad. Even so I get anywhere between 300-600kbs download and 100-200kbs up. Which is plenty good for me to get my work done on a temporary basis.
Moving out into the world beyond my apartment the one test I did saw much better connection (somewhere around -70dBm) and download speeds of 700-800kbs. Still not the promised 3.1mbs, but not shabby at all. The whole thing is incredibly easy to use (once I had the connection managing software installed), runs on my mac as well as my PC and I have high hopes that it’s reliability is going to be quite high - cellphone high. That is, as long as I have reception and I always do in my apartment, I hope this works. Even, if it doesn’t, though as long as Sprint stays up when Road Runner goes down I’m happy as a clam.
The card does suck down power - it seemed to cut out maybe a third of my battery life (in my unbelievably unscientific testing). But I have a lot of battery life in the ol’ P1120 so I’m not too concerned about that.
If Time Warner keeps it’s downtime at the pace it’s been going (3x down in the past 3 weeks, each one measured in hours, the last one measured in days - that doesn’t count the innumerable short down time I experience of 5-30 minutes) I will investigate getting one of them fancy EVDO routers. The cool ones take an EVDO card as well as a connection to your cable or DSL modem and allows you to do failover (or maybe even load balancing!), so you can be working over your cable connection and if it goes down switch seamlessly to EVDO. I know Howard was saying he set this up for several of his clients with great success. I don’t need that right now, but if cable keeps dieing, it may be worth the $300-$400.
This was a great buy for me - super convenient and except for the snafu of trying to install the software in my potentially peculiar situation it was really, really easy to get running. And at $60/month it isn’t the cheapest, but it isn’t breaking the bank, either - a nice basic insurance for me.
If you’re thinking about EVDO, I recommend it. I also recommend EVDOforums (and associated sites), although I’m sure you’d find it for yourself if you start doing any research on the subject. It was a wealth of information. Really.
