Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’m a reasonably frequent visitor to my parents’ house in Bethesda, Maryland.  Mom and Dad are both Harvard graduates and consequently have little trouble recognize the utter worthlessness of something developed to a large extent at MIT, i.e., the Internet.  There is thus no high-speed Internet connection in their house and their neighbors apparently share the belief that Internet is not worth paying for because there are no wireless networks from which to steal.

Frustrated at having to drive to a friend’s or sibling’s house every time I wanted to check the weather or email, I signed up for an $80/month Verizon data card.  Washington, D.C. area is one of its flagship service area, promising “typical speeds of 300-500 kbps, capable of reaching speeds up to 2 Mbps”.  Getting the PC 5220 card to work at all required a couple of calls to Verizon tech support, which, unlike Vonage and Lingo, involved minimal hold times and knowledgeable staff.  I needed to download a newer version of some software, which, of course, required an Internet connection…

How does it work?  The average throughput on the “broadband” network here in D.C. has been 50-100 kbps at most.  The software shows that at one point this computer achieved a peak rate of 450 kbps but there are long dropout periods when the rate is 0 kbps.  Most distressing, the service only lasts for 10-30 minutes, after which time this supposedly “always-on” service turns you off and you have to manually disconnect and reconnect to get back on.  Sometimes the software is smart enough to notice that you are disconnected and a little box comes up in the bottom right of your screen noting the fact of the disconnection.  Underneath the note are the words “Verizon: We never stop working for you (R)”.

On balance the service is somewhat similar in feel to a 56 kbps modem except that you never know if that 3-second wait for a Web page is going to turn into 60 seconds because you’ve been silently dropped from the network.

Using Windows XP it is sometimes necessary to reboot the machine in order to switch from 802.11b to Verizon or vice versa.

[Update: Verizon service in Richmond, VA: Richmond is part of the "broadband access" service area.  This translates into an average speed of  10-20 kbps.  There are enough dropouts that downloading a 3 MB email attachment proved impossible after four tries.  However, unlike in Washington, DC, the connection did not have to be manually reestablished every 10 minutes.]

While driving from Boston to Washington, DC there were two occasions where a national wireless Internet would have saved some fuel.  The first occurred when impulse dictated the following of a “New Jersey State Aquarium” sign off the NJ Turnpike.  This attraction was in the car’s GPS database so I asked the machine to change its destination. However, it turned out that the aquarium was closed for renovation until May and the side trip was merely a fuel-wasting detour.

The second occasion was en route to Longwood Gardens, near Wilmington, Delaware (fabulous greenhouses this time of year).  A bad accident on the other side of the road would have made it much faster to stay on the Interstate for another few exits.

The GPS is a $1000 machine with a powerful computer, a full North American database on a microdrive, and a large LCD display.  Adding an 802.11 receiver would add almost nothing to the cost.  If the U.S. had a free universally available wireless Internet companies such as Garmin would build Internet transceivers into their products so that they would know (1) current opening hours of attractions, and (2) the locations of traffic jams to route around.

We complain that we are running out of oil but we aren’t willing to lift a technological finger to conserve any.

[Note: The traffic accident was an interesting example of Mutually Assured Destruction via SUV.  The driver of a GMC SUV had lost control of his vehicle and spun it around, ending up by smashing into a tree. Because his vehicle was so ponderously bulky the impact had knocked the tree out of the ground.  Sadly, in a Coyote v. Road Runner-esque turn of events, the tree proceeded to fall on the SUV's roof.  In an effort to keep SUVs from rolling over there apparently isn't much structure up there.  So the entire roof of the SUV had been flattened by the tree.]