Scott Fullton at Tom’s Networking has a fascinating report on his experience with Verizon’s EV-DO wireless internet service…out in the woods. The exciting thing about EV-DO is the potential for coast-to-coast blanketed wireless internet access. Right now, though, EV-DO is primarily known for covering large metropolitan areas. So Scott Fullton decided to put the promise of rural EV-DO to the test.
To be sure, the test was conducted only about an hour away from Cincinnati, so it wasn’t like West Virginia or anything. But still, Scott was able to reach a high download rate of 256 kbps. Not blazingly fast, but not bad either, all things considered. However, the speed was strongly related to the time of day, and sometimes dropped below dial up rates.
The biggest problem that Scott encountered were the upload speeds, averaging about 3 kbps. That speed wouldn’t work for us at Gadzooki where we need to upload large picture files of all those toys that the cool kids want.