April 30, 2008 9:47 AM
Verizon Wireless Continues to Impress...At Least On Sunday Nights
This past Sunday night I hit a new high on my Verizon Wireless connection: 2.8Mbps.
My browser had crashed while more than sixty tabs were open. Normally I'd dread this situation as while I can restore my last session when restarting my browser, opening a whole bunch of tabs simultaneously is usually not a fun experience on slower connections.
But since it was Sunday night I decided to give it a go and couldn't have been more impressed by the performance.
Speeds never dropped below 1Mbps, and for more than half the time it was up over 2Mbps.
Everything opened up smoothly and quickly. It was exhilarating to see how far wireless has come.
The flipside to this though is that during week I've also seen how far it still has to go.
In the daytime hours, weekday performance never hits 2Mbps and tops 1Mbps far less than half the time. Typical speeds tend to be in the 500-750Kbps range, which is acceptable for most uses of the Internet.
But sometimes, and seemingly increasingly often recently, speeds drop below 500Kbps, at which point your experience using the Internet does begin to degrade rapidly. Especially frustrating are times when speeds don't even hit 200Kbps, which does happen with some frequency during times of peak usage.
Overall, I continue to be both impressed and satisfied the service Verizon Wireless delivers.
And so far this month, my usage hasn't even topped 1GB as I haven't had the time to watch Internet TV wirelessly while traveling, so at least for now I don't need to live in fear of topping 5GB and incurring those overage charges I wrote about here.
