Wandering with the Hotspot

Decided to go for a drive this morning with the goal of doing some testing of the Millenicom 4620 Hotspot.  In order to set a baseline, I took a reading using Speedtest.net before leaving the house.  The Hotspot was indicating 3 bars of 4G and the test indicated 20Mb/s download and over 7Mb/s upload.  Pretty good if I do say so myself.

Unfortunately, once we got away from 4G service, the speed dropped off precipitously. Parked across the road from the cell tower in Rye, with the cell tower filling our windshield and showing 5 bars on the Hotspot, we got our best 3G speeds of the day, less than 1/10 of the 4G performance.

It appears that signal strength does not have as much impact on speed as I'd anticipated. Further tests suggest that it may be related to time of day or luck of the draw for the ISP the hotspot uses. It took several tries when we got home to connect to the specific ISP used for the baseline test, and the afternoon results were notably slower than the morning.  We'll see if there are other factors we can control as we get more experience with the Hotspot.

Meanwhile, we had fun touring a bunch of streets, roads, and backroads on the north side of Payson. Found several nice looking houses at reasonable prices. Even found a boondocking spot with a great view of the rim.

Fire Control Road (NF-64)  is 10 miles of gravel that connects Highway 87 to the Houston Mesa Road. There are several spots at the western end that would be viable. The one I liked is south of the road about 100 yards, about 2.5 miles from the intersection with Highway 87.

A Step Further from the Luddites

I've been accused by one of my friends of being a Luddite which I find a bit hard to believe. There's enough geek-speak in this post to get me kicked out of any Luddite convention! The kids (can you call someone who's 40 a kid?) complain about the speed of the Internet connection at the house (which has been based on DSL for the past 10 years) but they don't call me a Luddite.

Last week we suffered from multiple connectivity outages. That, combined with a desire for faster service at a better price and better connectivity when we travel, led to a Friday morning order of a 3G/4G hotspot from Millenicom. Chris & Cherie, who live, work, and travel in a 50 year old GMC bus have been singing their praises for a long time and I can see why.

This little gizmo showed up in the mail today.  It's a NovaTel 4620 "MiFi" using data services from the Verizon network that Millenicom resells at a much more competitive price.

The battery charged while we were fixing dinner and then we fired it up and set up all the wireless enabled devices in the house to recognize it as their primary access.  Then we turned off and unplugged the DSL modem & wireless router.  A couple phone calls is all it is going to take to move our land-line phone & DSL service, and our expensive but poor performing ISP to the "remember when" category.   No more land line - hope it means fewer political calls at dinner time!

The advantage is that we can take it with us when we travel.  The disadvantage to our sometimes house-sitting daughter is that we'll take it with us when we travel!