Woohoo! 1500kbps!!!

[Guest dwallersv]

I have my issues with Verizon, and share all the frustration and anger with everyone else here over their totalitarian, nickel-and-dime business model. The whole GPS thing really torques me off.

That said, I just can't get too into spittin' nails with the 3G performance I'm getting. I just switched from ATT a few weeks ago when I bought my Omnia. Where I live I have pretty crappy GSM/UTMS reception from ATT, who I've been with for years. A crude signal strength comparison I know, but with 1-2 bars on my Treo the only way I get the phone to lock a 3G connection was to set it into UTMS-only mode, so it wouldn't fall back to EDGE.

Here at my house, the best I could do was about 400kpbs -- respectable, and much better than EDGE, but still nothing to crow about. Further, with UTMS-only mode, actually getting a data connection at all was spotty, so I didn't have any consistent 3G anyway.

The 3G coverage all over Santa Cruz country is only a bit better, and is spotty.

On to Verizon, Omnia, and EVDO. Signal strength according to crude signal bar measurement is about the same, just a bit better. 1-3 bars, spending most time in the 2-3 bar range. So this obviously helps. But... WHOAH! I consistently get 1500kbps down, 400-500kpbs up, sitting in my home. What's more, the coverage around Santa Cruz country is much better, more consistent, and doesn't have the shadows and dropouts that ATT GSM had. In short, I can actually do things like use my Orb streaming server to deliver music without pauses, dropouts, etc. With about 100GB of music on my server, it just isn't practical to load it on to my Omnia (I have a selection on a card for those places where there isn't good coverage, which surely exist, but I haven't found one yet).

These speeds were measured with the phone tethered to the PC using the commercial release of WMWifiRouter, and testing both via speedtest.net and the Java applet on dslreports.com. Consistent results.

With this sort of network connectivity and performance, I can grit my teeth and wait for Verizon to unlock the GPS. ATT, for me at least, you lost a customer by having crappy coverage in my area, and making a stupid decision to delay intorduction of the GSM Omnia because of your iPhone marketing campaign (which I'd have right now if they had stuck with Oct '08, so I guess I should thank them for this idiocy).

What sorts of speeds are other Verizon EVDO Omnia owners seeing? BTW, don't depend on the dslreports.com mobile speedtest -- it is wildly inaccurate, depending on simple http transfer protocol. It's a fair gross-level measure of performance, but routers and other networking gear prioritizes port 80 traffic lower than other traffic, and in some cases sniff packets looking for HTTP protocol (there's no requirement that it runs over port 80, after all) to prioritize it down-level. Also, keep in mind that HTTP port 80 traffic is competing with ordinary web connections on the target server, so there can be delays in sending data for the speed test from the server simply because its busy servicing lots of web-surfing requests.

Dedicated applet tests are the most accurate, as they open a TCP circuit via a dedicated port, then stream data from there. No web server parsing, etc. in the way. No interfering requests from other users on the same inbound port. And other optimizations for testing data throughput. Unfortunately, none of these test apps seem to work in the "lite" version of things like Flash player on the Omnia etc., so the only way to get a good, accurate speed test is to tether.

Okay, done rambling. Just wanted to share, as these speeds I'm getting are thrilling. Worst case I've seen to date is around 750 down, 250 up. I can live with that :-)