Graves On SOHO VoIP

Yes, it’s true, I’ve been a little distracted. Recently a lot of my focus has been work related, as I’ve been on a project in Baltimore the past two weeks. During the time I’ve been staying at a Doubletree near Johns Hopkins University. It’s a quiet place with a good restaurant, including a nice wine list.

Sadly, cellular service in the area is spotty. I’ve had no T-Mobile coverage in my room. That leaves me relying upon VoIP over the hotel Wifi or my Sprint Mifi. Happily, those have been decent options.

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…power that is. I’m  such a sucker for a pun or inflammatory headline. The one area that the Sprint issued Mifi device leaves me wanting is in the battery life. If you are accustomed to wifi all the time then the battery in the mifi is just not going to satisfy. Oh, it lasts a good long while…perhaps 2-3 hours…but that’s not near long enough in many cases.

This is by no means a defect of the device. It’s just a little contrast between the permanence of a real wifi AP and the wee little Mifi. Around the house I expect that the wifi is just always there, and so the connection, although wireless, is constant.

I went looking last weekend to find the Mifi box. I wanted to check and see if I had overlooked a USB cable. I hadn’t. According to the manifest on the side of the box Sprint doesn’t provide the micro-USB cable. I gather that Verizon does.

Rumor has it that the Mifi will operate directly attached to a host PC usng a micro-USB cable. So attached the PC powers the device resulting effectively unlimited run-time. This seems more ideal tha my present situation so I bought a micro-USB cable on E-Bay for $4 and will try this when I get home on the weekend.

This a a really good interview. If you carry a cell phone you need to watch.

It’s just over a month since I took the decision to buy Sprint’s 3G mobile internet service using a Mifi device. Thus far I’m really enjoying the device and the service.

During my first trip with the device I racked up 1.5 GB of data transfer and was starting to worry that 5GB a month was going to be too little. But then I had two trips to Canada where the roaming fees made using the Mifi impractical. So in the first month I used around 2 GB. Not too bad.

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I promise that after this week I won’t focus so much on the Mifi and this Sprint 3G service. From an early Wednesday morning perspective here’s what I’m seeing for performance.

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So here’s how the Sprint 3G service  measures now that I’m away from my home office location. Note that my laptop clock is on CDT. It’s just before 6am west coast time.

As you can see I tried tests against several servers in different locations. The test to the server in Chicago was markedly better than the others, with a ping time under 100 ms.

I thought that I’d have another check of the Sprint 3G data rate now that we’re into the weekend. The performance in the mid-afternoon during the week was not bad at all. I was wondering if there would be any change on the weekend.

It seems to be markedly improved  on the weekend. Today it measures: 1.94 Mb/s download, 520kbps upload with a ping time to Dallas of 155 ms. That was at around 2pm CDT.

The real test will be when I’m in SFO next week.

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After thinking about 3G based mobile broadband for the past month, and suffering through another bout of paying for less than stellar access at hotels, Andy Abramson finally broke through the last of my resistance with a post about weekend Mifi deals on Amazon. I fell for the offer of the one cent Mifi device and decided on Sprint as the carrier.

As I mentioned earlier in the week I had been wanting to add the service to my T-Mobile account, since that where I have my cell service…and I’m happy with them. But many people told me that T-Mobile’s 3G network was not up to the task. Also, they don’t yet offer a Mifi-style device. That left Sprint and Verizon as my options.

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