I've had some time to play with the EVDO options out there – I ended up getting a Sprint card in addition to the Verizon one I had as well. The Sprint card is a Novatel Wireless EX720, and I have the usual 5GB monthly plan.
Both Verizon and Sprint have similar UI's for their management applications. I like Verizon's statistics graphing capabilities, but I much prefer the Sprint application for everything else – it seems to be better adapted to deal with Windows Vista.
The actual service is far better on the Sprint network than Verizon. Based on my testing thus far, here's some comparisons:
Verizon
Latency: 138ms
Download: 756Kbps
Upload: 182Kbps
Sprint
Latency: 101ms
Download: 1094Kbps
Upload: 435Kbps
This is from the same location, the same night. The Verizon towers seem to be pretty consistently slower than Sprint. I'll do some additional testing over the next week or two to see if things stay the same. Thus far, I'm going to stay with Sprint.
Here are the speedtest.net results:
Sprint
Verizon
EVDO update – Sprint vs Verizon
June 20, 2008 By 2 Comments
one thing you aren’t telling us, is what signal is being received by both devices at the time you are testing speeds.
maybe you *want* to know which device/service works best with just built in antennas, but it seems like you want to know which service has best speeds in your area… and signal can seriously affect speeds.
if you want to pass judgement on speed alone, take signal out of the equation by sitting under the respective towers.
and if signal *IS* the reason one carrier’s speeds are affected where you are, then keep in mind that every Rev-A device from Sprint and Verizon have RF jacks to accept high gain antennas and even signal amplifiers.
here’s a good article for folks to read: http://www.EVDOinfo.com/RSSI
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the EVDO Exerts are at http://www.EVDOinfo.com
I completely agree regarding signal strength. In all cases, I was able to get a much higher signal strength from Sprint than from Verizon. My testing was pretty extensive in the area I live, and included moving around in a 20 mile area that I would frequent in downtown/metro Seattle area. Signal strength with the tests above were:
Sprint -63dbm
Verizon -104dbm
Yes, it’s obvious that Verizon is not getting a fair share since it’s signal strength is poor. But my point is not to test their internal (after RF) network performance, but the combination of the RF tower and internal network.
In all of my tests, Verizon seems to have much weaker signals, and problematic internal networks as well. Latencies on their network even with good signal strength are always in excess of 200ms, whereas Sprint is sub 100ms in almost all cases.
I also have information in my line of work on particulars of both of their internal networks, and have reviewed both of their designs at a high level, and am also aware of their tower designs too. There were enough things that were close together that prompted me to review both services.
Antennas didn’t seem to help me that much in the area I’m in. I have two antennas from your store, one small desktop one, and one larger marine grade antenna. In both cases with Verizon, I wasn’t able to get much more out of them. I did test them per instructions found on your site as well as elsewhere, and tried many iterations.
With Sprint, the antennas seem to help a bit more, but not too much. With the signal levels I get from them right now, I’m not too concerned about it.
My plan is to transition my entire home computing network onto this connection, and I do a lot off SSH and web browsing, so latency is important. Download and upload is as well, and even moreso upload since I am doing outbound services – SSH , remote desktop, etc. The other use for this is on my boat, which now has the high gain marine antenna installed (I will provide more details later) which will allow me to be online while underway to get weather and other useful services.
Hope this helps!