Verizon Wireless Broadband Internet Card: Information and Review

I have been a Verizon wireless broadband internet customer for the past six years. Two years ago I relocated to the Palm Springs area from San Diego. Since then I have experienced a much degraded performance of my wireless internet connection. The wireless phone service seems roughly the same as in San Diego, and is basically fine with few dropped calls or dead areas here.

Out here in the desert, my internet connection is achieved solely through my Verizon EVDO card. I am not satisfied with the performance. For that reason, I have put together this brief review and information package about wireless broadband internet technology and my experiences out here in the desert.

I am using a PC5750 EVDO broadband card. The card fits into the PCMCIA slot in my Toshiba laptop running Vista. These EVDO cards have impressive specs. The advertised bandwidth of my EVDO card is 600-1400kbps download and 500-800kbps upload. These rates are the maximum that the Verizon system will support. The bandwidth typically achievable is dependent on several factors. These include, (1) the distance between the user and the nearest tower, (2) sharing bandwidth with other cell and broadband users nearby, (3) atmospheric conditions, weather, solar activity and the like.

My experience here in the desert has been rather disappointing. Verizon only achieves download speeds in the range of 100-500kbps, upload speeds in the range of 50-100kbps. These numbers are only 10% to 20% of the advertised specs. That is slow. It is 1994 dial-up modem slow. Verizon Broadband gets a grade of D for bandwidth. Now to the problem of dropped internet connections. These occur roughly once per day of usage time. Most of the time when the connection is dropped, it cannot be reestablished from the network control panel. Instead one must shut everything down and reboot. This type of connection loss is a big problem. Any current work I am doing online such as filling out forms and editing blog posts is usually lost when the connection is dropped. Verizon achieves only a grade C-minus on connection reliability. Verizon Broadband’s GPA of D-plus is a very poor grade indeed.


Overall, I would rate the broadband service from Verizon wireless as often unreliable, and a constant source of uncertainty and frustration. It is likely that in the near future I will be switching to a Time Warner Cable service package for internet, telephone, and television. If I do that, I will actually be able to stop all use of Verizon wireless services. I would have preferred to stick with Verizon, but the performance of the Internet service via Broadband card, has been unacceptably inadequate.

Bing Shows Steady After Initial Surge

Update July 11, 2009 Auditioning Bing

Bing achieves steady share of search market after initial surge.

First, let me say that I started using Bing as my home page search engine in early June. Initially I did this to test, evaluate, and contrast Bing and Google. After a few days of testing I posted my observations and initial impressions on this site (see previous posts here.) The conclusion of my evaluation? I was happy enough with Bing to leave it as my home page search engine. And I continued using Bing as my main search tool up to the present.

Bing’s search performance seems comparable to Google. Such is my experience to date. I am happy with Bing because of a few simple user-interface-experience features. Bing simply has a nicer look and feel than Google. In short, I found that I had no reason to switch back to Google, and didn’t.

How is Bing doing in the market? After an initial surge to a 16% share of daily searches, Bing settled down to a 10% share through June. On July 8,9 Bing usage surged again to pass Yahoo Search and capture a 12.9% share. These statistics come from StatCounter GlobalStats. Analysis posted on TechCrunch suggests that Bing's latest bump-up in search traffic was largely captured from Google. Interesting.

TechCrunch Article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/10/bing-leapfrogs-yahoo-search-again/

The outlook? It seems that Google is going to be solidly in first place at ~ 75% search traffic share for the foreseeable future.

This picture might change if Google users continue to switch to Bing at a sustained rate. Should trend spotters see Bing’s market share continuing to grow at Google’s expense over the coming 6 months, Google would have a big problem.