This is part 3/3 of my evdo quest for fast internet.  In this post I hope to explain the shortcomings of all of my available options for internet access and which one turns out to be the best.  I will be providing several screenshots of different internet connection methods to prove a point including actual ping trials.  I actually had to borrow a dialup account to do this and was sort of unsuccessful at obtaining a speedtest (so I had to borrow one).

Looking back at my history of internet usage, I can say that I have exhausted every possible connection that I can obtain.  I’m hoping that by writing this blog, I will save someone the agony that I have gone through in the past 7 years and provide a quicker route to getting usable internet (as I like to call it).  Before I even start, if you can get Cable, DSL, or FIOS, or another form of land based wired internet connectivity don’t even bother reading this blog since I don’t have them and can’t explain why they are better with proof (they just are).

I would like to start out with Dialup internet. Dialup is often the only form of affordable internet access for people in rural areas and this is why I have tried it and am blogging about it.  An example of a quality dialup provider is http://copper.net

First the disadvantages of dialup : Dialup has a major disadvantage of speed.  Dialup is very slow to connect (1 minute to dialup to the remote location) and is also very slow speedwise (56Kbps under ideal conditions).  In addition, Dialup uses your existing telephone line, therefore, while on dialup, your phone will be tied up and appear busy to outside callers.  In addition, Dialup requires that your phone line be fairly clear.  Unfortunately the phone line to our house is very old (ran circa 1930) and runs under a modern day wetland area (I would call it a swamp).  Obviously our phone line has a lot of noise in it which prevents dialup from connecting any faster than 24Kbps (in the city, I get 48Kbps).  Dialup has fairly good error control even though our phone line has a lot of noise and crackle in it.  Unfortunately, the noise in the line can be so excessive in spurts that it causes the connection to be lost.  Because of this, I was only able to get my own ping test, I had to borrow speedtests from elsewhere.

The upside to dialup is that it has a decent latency because it is ran via land.  Latency is the time it takes to send a signal to a remote computer and back over the connection, this is measured in milliseconds (ms) and is called a ping.  If you wish to try to ping google for instance, open up a command prompt and type “ping www.google.com”.  This will give you the latency of your test (it does 4 trials in Windows XP).  Latency on Dialup is effected by telephone line noise and connection distance to the local internet service provider (isp).

Now for some details on my testing for dialup:

This connection is connected to netzero (a free account that I had laying around).  It was connected at 24Kbps and I performed a latency test to google.  My average latency on dialup through my line was 258ms.  This isn’t bad for low latency applications such as SSH (remote linux terminal, completely text based) and VPN (virtual private networking) which both require very low latencies (below 300ms) to even connect.

Now comes the downfall.  I could not acquire a speedtest because I was disconnected from the internet (it took well over a half hour to complete which my connection couldn’t support).  I had to find speedtests which was a very hard task.  This is very close to what I would get if I let my speedtest complete without error.

This kind of speed is just useless for any kind of internet surfing.  Most webpages today are 100KB or more, and on this connection, 100KB will download in about 50 seconds to a minute.  This is the biggest downfall to dialup!

So now, lets move onto satellite internet.

I have wildblue satellite internet at home.  This is the connection that I have been using for the past few years.  It advertises 512Kbps down, 128Kbps up.

The advantages to Satellite Internet:

1. Stability – The connection rarely goes down.  Reasons for the connection going out is bad weather at my location or the WildBlue ground station.  Or if someone at WildBlue trips over the main internet line *ha ha*, but I bet it has happened a few times when our internet was out for no reason.
2. Always on and doesn’t tie up the phone line
3. It is fairly fast for web browsing (not considering latency just yet)

The disadvantages:

1. Latency will kill you – I will detail a bit about the high latency below.
2. Wildblue has several ground stations, but each ground station can’t take over another ground station’s frequency on the satellite, so if the weather there is bad, you won’t have a connection.  This happens frequently in the summer.
3. During peak usage times the connection is much worse than dialup (higher latency, slower speed).  I will detail this below also!
4. Your bandwidth (total data transfer allowance) is limited severely compared to land based solutions (7.5GB of downloads per month on the lowest plan or about 10 movie downloads at 800mb each)
5. Wildblue will cost an arm and a leg- the lowest priced package is 50 bucks a month

Hughesnet to Wildblue.  I’m using Wildblue’s value pack which offers 512Kbps down, 128Kbps with 7.5GB download and 2GB of uploads per month.  This is 50 dollars per month and if I go over the download / upload limit, I can be terminated by Wildblue and pay fees to them for this if I ever do it again (the first time is a warning). I’ve always been very careful of this contract limitation to prevent getting billed heavily.  Wildblue will also slow your speed down until you go back to 80% usage.  This means that if you downloaded 8GB the first day of service, you would be billed for the rest of that month and not be able to use your service (it is slowed down to dialup speeds with high latency), plus you can be terminated by Wildblue if it ever happens again.  Imagine 30 days waiting for that 8GB to disappear off your record before you get your speed back

On Hughesnet, their lowest plan will provide 1024Kbps down, 128Kbps up with a different limit system.  They limit you per day to 250MB of download and 50MB of upload (I think).  This also varys by plan.  If you go over this limit during the day, they will slow you down for a day then restore it with no contract violations or service outages.  Unlike Wildblue this is daily so you aren’t slowed down for possibly a full month.  In addition, Hughesnet allows you to download without this limit between 2am and 7am every morning when their system is underused by a lot. Also, hughesnet is more resistant to rain fade (weather effecting the signal strength and connectivity) and allows you to see how strong your signal is unlike wildblue.  I also found lower ping times on Hughesnet (800ms vs the wildblue average of 1300ms).

Unfortunately though, hughesnet and wildblue still suffer from peak time usage slowdowns every night and on weekends.

Lets show some details.  My plan is 512Kbps down, 128Kbps up remember (50 bucks per month).  First, I will show my latency tests.  The first series of pings was performed at 9:30pm at night, I left the computer on overnight with this window open to take the 2nd series of the ping test from non peak usage time (this was taken in the morning.  I used NASA.GOV because it is a government controlled server and *should* have really low ping response times for land based connections.

As you can see, during the morning the average ping is much lower than during the evening during peak usage hours.  now lets goto the speedtests:

This above one is for a peak usage time connection.  Notice I’m only getting 180Kbps down, 30Kbps up (compared to my advertised speed of 512Kbps down, 128Kbps up).  This connection is useless for even surfing because the latency is much higher with a slower speed (see above).

Here is a speedtest above from the morning when there is little usage or normal usage.  Notice that I’m getting 530Kbps down, 60Kbps up.  Still not a good upload speed, but its better than 30Kbps which is comparable to dialup!  Also notice the pings, this isn’t quite true because these were taken around the same time of the day (different days though) when I did the latency ping test on the command prompt above.

Now lets move onto EVDO from Verizon (I know, this is a long blog)

Lets first start out with the advantages and disadvantages (for both rev 0 and rev a since they are both good)

Advantages:

1. Land based wireless communication, but its more land based and latency is much lower and comparable to DSL and Cable (especially under revision A, revision 0 matches Dialup latency more).
2. Speed is quite good.  It can exceed DSL speeds with up to 3.1Mbps download on Rev A, 1.8Mbps down on Rev 0 (1024 Kbps = 1Mbps).  Normally DSL gets about 1.5Mbps max download.  The upload on Rev a can reach 800kbps and on Rev 0, 128kbps.
3. Stability – if you get a good signal, this will rarely drop unless Verizon or the provider is doing tower repairs and such.
4. Mobile, this can move with you

Disadvantages:

1. Expensive.  EVDO can cost 60 bucks per month on Verizon.
2. Low Bandwidth allowance then excessive overage charges (5GB of downloading per month, then 5 to 10 cents per MegaByte (MB) over)
3. not the best replacement to DSL or Cable (but the only option in the country)
4. Works only if you get a cell signal on EV.  If you don’t get 3 bars, your connection will suck.  You need 4 bars for a decent connection.  There are cellphone boosters like the one I got that give excellent reception (see part 2 of my evdo quest).

So, I’m paying my heart out for an EVDO connection through Verizon and I love my connection speed thus far.  It has excellent latency and fair reliability.  The speed that comes with it is merely a bonus.

So here are some ping tests:

The above is from EVDO rev 0 with a perfect signal.  Notice the average latency beats dialup and satellite already at 236ms!  Lets do a speedtest:

Once again, much faster than Hughesnet, Wildblue, Dialup or any other connection that I have seen available to me!  And the really great part is, I haven’t even touched EVDO revision A yet.  Lets do that now, shall we?

Notice the average ping of 102ms.  DSL and Cable average at 30ms to 100ms, so I’d say this is a latent land connection.  EVDO rev a rocks, no?  Lets see a speedtest:

The speedtest above shows that rev a is a bit better than Rev 0!  This is now my primary connection method and I use satellite as a backup.  Maybe some day we will get DSL or something else land run, but until then, I’m quite happy with this setup.

Hopefully this will give you some insight into different connections that I use and sort of show why I like EvDo the best.  I’m sure something faster will come eventually, but until then, I’m now focused on stability of the connection to the Verizon tower, not so much the speed aspect.

Tags: allowance, bandwidth, broadband, comparison, dialup, evdo, fast, hughesnet, latency, ping, reliability, rev 0, rev a, satellite, signal, speed, speedtest, stability, strength, wildblue
Posted in Mobile Technology, Student Life, Technology

6 Responses to “Technically Comparing Satellite, EvDo, and Dialup”

1. Wireless Internet Provider Monitor says:

   June 8, 2009 at 5:14 am

   This is one really cool and concise comparison. Love it, thanks.
2. KattyBlackyard says:

   June 14, 2009 at 9:21 pm

   Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!
3. James Wu says:

   June 18, 2009 at 3:48 pm

   Your site and posts are very interesting ! Thanks for providing such a great resource. With so many junk sites out there it’s refreshing to find one with valuable, useful information ! I’ll be back to read regularly !
   Thanks,
   Jeanine
4. Alan says:

   June 22, 2009 at 6:28 pm

   Wow very well described. I feel for you, I do not think I could get used to those speeds after cable from Optimum. But having 4 bars on your cell must be nice compared to my 1 to bars or any bars really.
5. Louis says:

   July 3, 2009 at 11:56 am

   How did you change between REV 0 and REV A for this test?
6. Famous Phil says:

   July 6, 2009 at 1:16 pm

   Simple, I used 2 different cards with tethering plans. My first is a phone which is Rev 0 compatible (LG VX8100), my other is Rev A compatible (USB 760 Data Card). I just used both to give the results I needed.