Quote:
Originally Posted by cowislander
I'd recommend buying a used Verizon 3G MiFi (about $75) on eBay and then opening a prepaid acct with Verizon. They have several plans for prepaid, its on the expensive side per use, but its much cheaper than a multi year contract based plan. I only use mine at the lake, so I pay $80 for 5 gb for the month of August, it works well and up to 5 users can tether off the device. Coverage is excellent on Cow, a lot more than I can say for AT&T!
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/m...nd/?page=plans
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That's what I use now (Verizon). At least on the South/West side of Rattlesnake, the service is marginably usable. The signal strength is fine, but the network performance is absolutely abysmal. I run a constant ping against my Virtual Private Network. Here are the results:
Ping statistics for 10.0.0.11:
Packets: Sent = 270076, Received = 264442, Lost = 5634 (2% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 197ms, Maximum = 4500ms, Average = 597ms
Notice the AVERAGE time is just short of 600ms. That includes the times at 3:00AM when no one is using the system! Daytime and particularly evening ping times are much longer - 800 to 1000ms is often a typical average.
Reasonable cable-based Internet will yield ping times of 30ms or better, and DSL about the same - maybe 40ms if it's not super fast.
In practical terms, you're doing a LOT of waiting - sometimes over 2 minutes for a web page to load (try mlb.com or something like that). Remote Desktop is often unusable because the performance is so poor. Even simple protocols such as ssh or telnet - it may take 3 or 4 seconds for a single character to echo!
Verizon claims the particular cell that we're hitting from here is terribly overloaded, but then again there are no immediate plans to upgrade it to 4g - the cities are going to be done first.
Other people near me have the same experience.