It's been two years or so and my love affair with the AT&T 3G network is waning. Until the 7 billion dollar network upgrade happens, those of us on the west coast California market will have to make due with the hope and prayer that that the iPhone carry crowd doesn't always bog down our uploads when we're conducting business on our AT&T powered Netbooks that one can buy at Radio Shack for $99.00 plus a data plan commitment.
When I'm in markets outside of the congestion packed LA, San Diego and San Francisco-San Jose regions the speeds are usually where they are supposed to be, like 1.5 megs down and roughly 500-700k up in Tulsa, Oklahoma when sitting at the gate for my Southwest flight to take off. But the inconsistent nature of the congestion and the two year renewal and opportunity to buy a new Aircard from Verizon for two of my accounts came around so we grabbed a couple of the newest offerings in CDMA 3G. I'm not sorry.
This week I ran a series of tests with the new card. The one that was the most impressive was a 30 minute packet loss free video call over Skype with a colleague on the Comcast network in San Francisco and another one the next day with webcasting colleague on KenRadio, Ken Rutkowski. On the Mac Book Pro and Mac Book Air the video was sharp and crisp. No wavering. The audio was pristine. Clear and without dropouts.
On my Netbooks, the audio experience was perfect, but the video was choppy.
Bottom line is given how much I travel, the Verizon card is now an essential part of my road warrior kit. Sure I'll still have AT&T and Sprint gear handy (I use the Sprint Card with a CradlePoint Router to share connections) but what I'm seeing from Verizon Wireless right now tells me their wireless broadband network is ready for business.
I have to agree. I just spent 2 hours streaming live TV to my Verizon phone via slingbox while driving. After about a minute of buffering the stream was beautiful the whole time.
Mark
Posted by: Mark Polino | April 18, 2009 at 02:19 PM