Before I even start, I need to define a few terms that might confuse you.  I will use Kbps and Mbps quite often in this article.  These stand for Kilo/Mega bits per second.  These are used to measure connection speed.  DON’T CONFUSE THESE WITH KB/S AND MB/S which are your actual download speeds (KiloBytes/MegaBytes per second).

I live approximately 6 miles from the closest cellphone tower that I can get a half way decent link to.  There is another in the opposite direction about 5 miles away, but in our location, we could never get over the hill and trees to establish a connection of over 1 bar even with a specialized booster system.  I also should state that we live in a valley almost, although there is a passage through the hills that is relatively at the same level above sea level, this is the general direction the cell tower that we connect to is in.   If we were to connect to the other tower, we would have to bypass the highest hill in our entire county to get to the tower in that direction (Cattaraugus County, NY).

Before I get into any details, I connect to the Verizon EvDo network.  AT&T does not service our general area, Sprint roams in our area.  I’m not sure, but on TMobile, I get 1 bar in perfect conditions, so that may be an AT&T tower roaming.  I will leave that up to an expert to comment on if one wishes to do so.

Verizon EVDO is a specialized data network developed for cell phones to connect to the internet.  EVDO stands for Evolution-Data Optimized.  As you might guess, its made for high speed internet and is similar to the 3G technology offered by AT&T for the IPhone and other similar phones.

Verizon EvDo has a few different revisions, plus there is another 1x voice network that can handle internet data (although very slow, it does work).  Verizon’s 1x network that supports both voice and data is able to support a 128Kbps data speed (both uploading and downloading) and is suitable for voice.  The 1x network in many instances is stronger and able to maintain a connection in weaker signal areas, therefore in an area like mine, I normally connect to the 1x network without any kind of boost to the signal or locating my cellphone in good signal spots.

Verizon’s Evdo has 2 current Revisions that I know of.  The Revision 0 standard can handle a 128Kbps upload speed and 1.8Mbps download speed in optimal signal conditions (about 16KB/s up, 150KB/s down).   This is slightly older though, the current standard is EvDo Rev A.  This standard can handle 2.1Mbps upload, 3.1Mbps download under optimal conditions and with appropriate equipment (or about 268KB/s up, 400KB/s down).  In most conditions, you won’t ever achieve these speeds unless you are right next to the tower, but in most cities, you should achieve a very fast connection because you need an ideal signal.

For the past year, I have been using a tethering plan to get data on the Verizon network with my EvDo Rev 0 phone.  I noticed at the end of last summer, I was always getting on the 1x network, but I could always go outside and fix that problem.  This year, I know I have all summer, and I want decent internet access for voice over ip, etc.

Knowing that boosters existed, I had my father pick one up (on my tab).  I had a Zboost yx500 cel (800mhz only) booster here and we put the external antenna outside at the highest point.  Like the product said, it did give me 4 bars of signal inside, but it was only within an inch of the unit.  Data also wasn’t much better than what I could get when taking my phone outside with a computer.  I was let down, and had the zboost returned a day later.

Now comes the amazing part of using the dish: I was looking online at more powerful boosters and discovered that many people use parabolic antennas for reception.  We have a huge 10′ cband satellite dish in the back yard that has been unhooked for at least 5 years now.   We were actually considering scrapping it for junk money!  I’m glad we didn’t do that now.  Anyways, I wondered for a few days if I could use that to get a decent signal. I was bored about a week ago so I thought, why not take my vx6800 evdo rev a phone out to the dish and put it in front of it and try to focus a signal to it.  Surprisingly although the 6800 has a horrible antenna (no signal most places here), I got 1 bar with the dish pointed way off, so I took some tools out and pointed the dish with my father the other day.  To our pleasant surprise, I started getting 4 bars and an excellent signal when we got the dish aligned appropriately and used its focal length to focus a signal onto the phone. To put the signal in perspective (using ##debug on the phone pad to get the field test screen), I went from a -110db signal to a -70db signal.  Thats about a 40db gain, stronger than most amplifiers will guarantee.

To point the satellite dish, I sort of cheated using GPS.  I know where both towers are exactly, so I got the altitude and coordinates of the tower.  I then used the GPS to point the satellite dish correctly onto the tower.  It took a little time (vs a guess and check approach), but it provided a really good signal on our first try.

Knowing that the zboost would bring the signal inside (and boost it slightly), I had it brought back and we mounted the antenna correctly onto the dish.  Since the old dish had RG6 satellite cable already ran into the house, we used the existing low loss cable to connect the booster to the antenna (instead of the RG6 cable provided with it).

As the box says, the signal did come into the house as 4 bars within 4 feet of the base unit.  I found that 2 bars were still visible within 25 feet of the unit (before I go behind a lot of walls).   Unlike Jordan (In his blog here) and using the yx500 single band unit, my signal did go further.  I know this is because I have a very strong signal outside for it unlike Jordan had. I would still say the unit is a bit far fetched on its estimates of signal coverage area, but its more than fine for me (I don’t even use a cell phone for voice in my room, although I can now).  So I recommend if you get a zboost system, make sure you have a very strong signal outside.

Now for the boost that the zboost provided.  Inside within an inch of the unit, my previous -115db signal is now -35 to -40db.  This is better than it would be in the city (I get about -70 on that 6800).  I’m very happy with this setup, although I may consider finding ways of pushing the signal further into the house so I can talk in another room without problems if I ever would want to.   I also can use 2 data connections at maximum speed at the same time.  I will compare my exact speed results, but for now, I will say that I am averaging about 2Mbps down, .4Mbps up on my evdo rev a connection.

So now for photos of my setup:

This is by far the best connection to the internet I’ve ever had and my next blog in the next day or two will explain exactly why I say this!  So the next time you have the signal blues, try using a big dish to focus directly on your signal, you might be surprised, I know I was!

Links to other blogs that also may interest you:

• 10 Ways to hide your Satellite Dish

First I’d like to give a history lesson.  For the past 7 years of my life (the computer oriented part of it anyways), I’ve known about high speed internet options, but I’ve never been able to bring them to my home. Keep in mind that I live in the middle of nowhere where the neighbors are a ways away from me (think thousands of feet).   My town is not that populated, in the last census, I think it was just over 700 people in the town.  With that said, this is why no one would think about bringing high speed into our town.

I can remember my first day on the internet here at home.  It was the Christmas of 2000 and my father got me a free internet hookup through Kmart’s bluelight dial up service.  Ad supported, I was easily able to get on the internet at a whopping 24Kbps (I had no clue what anything meant, I just knew that I could now get on the internet from home).   I now know that modems can connect at a max of 48Kbps when the phone line has no noise in it.  Not knowing much about the internet then, I went to Yahoo.com from home and said, woah   Obviously, only knowing about Yahoo and how to get info for research projects at school, I was quite happy with this hookup.  I didn’t realize that anything else existed, and for that matter, there was such a connection that was faster for home users anywhere.

As time progressed, I discovered a lot about the internet and what limitations bluelight internet had (how much time I could be on).  I also discovered that it tied up our phone line all the time (which was not fun).  In time, I also learned that there were options out there for paid internet that didn’t have ads.  I can’t tell you how many times I begged my father to get one of these services that don’t have ads or custom dialers.  Unfortunately, it took a few years before he finally gave in, I think it was around 2003 because I remember going to France that year (thats another story I should tell sometime in the future).  I’m still not sure if bluelight offers internet, but Copper does provide dialup.

Somewhere around the time when we got paid dialup, our already ancient phone lines started getting *really* bad.  I remember many nights around 2004-2006 when I couldn’t connect and stay connected for more than 5 minutes.  I also remember that my fastest connection rate would be 16Kbps.  By this time though, I realized that our phone lines are over 60 years old and our phone lines ran through a swamp (and were likely drenched with water).  Verizon claimed that DSL was coming, but I didn’t know how since the phone lines would have to be re-ran to provide dsl.  I would think something like fiber would actually be cheaper to run than new phone lines.

Wanting something faster, I convinced my father to get satellite internet through cband (our old 10′ satellite dish in the yard) for 30 bucks a month.  The idea of it was to use the existing signal to get a fast download speed and use the phone line to upload to the internet.  This is called a hybrid connection.  When the phone was useable, this was an excellent connection and solved many of my problems of frustration (that is provided the phone worked, which wasn’t that often).

At this point, you probably asked, why not bug the phone company to fix the issue?  Well, we had the phone company out here numerous times in those years and every time they said they can’t support modems on the phone line.  They only will support when the phone doesn’t work for voice.  Modems are far more sensative to noise in a phone line than voice, so obviously, Verizon was no help here.   To this day, the phone still has bad noise in it and Verizon has not done anything to fix it.

Regardless, in late 2006, we ordered Wildblue Satellite internet (2 way system that doesn’t require the phone line).  When I first got this, I was very impressed with the speed and very happy with it.  This is the start of decent internet where I live.  Unfortunately, as time has progressed, I’ve found many faults with this sytem.

Satellite internet systems such as Wildblue suffer from latency and usage spikes.

Firstly, satellite signals travel about 26,000 miles at the speed of light.  This kind of distance coupled with routing latency at the network center for the satellite company causes about a 1.5 second lag on Wildblue.  This means that while Wildblue may be decent for surfing (if you don’t mind lookup delays and block ads which cause massive amounts of lookups and tons of delays in loading pages), wildblue will suck for any kind of remote control applications or time critical applications.  Examples of this are in gaming on xbox live, wii over the internet, etc.  Satellite will also make voice calls (computer to telephone calls) more like a walkie talkie if it works at all.  It also causes a lot of time outs for normal surfing if your site has tons of requests.

Usage spikes on satellite are considered peak usage hours.  During the evenings and weekends, I’ve noticed that Wildblue often slows down to 56Kbps to 100Kbps for download speeds when it advertises 512Kbps for our package.  I’ve also noticed that the lag increases to about 3.5 to 4 seconds.  To normal surfing, pages load ultra slow, and dialup would actually be faster (even on my crappy phone line).

Sadly, I’ve waited on the phone company for long enough for decent internet and got nowhere.  Recently, I discovered that I can use EVDO to get high speed internet that is comparable to DSL.  All I needed to do is get a good cell phone signal.  My next blog will detail a lot about my EVDO experience and why it is the only option for me that works well and will likely be the only option for a long time to come (I doubt DSL or cable will be here anytime soon). Look forward to pictures too

I did send our local senator (Senator Catharine M. Young) a letter a few weeks ago highlighting many of the problems with internet connectivity where I live.  Unfortunately, the day I finished writing this letter to Senator Young, Verizon changed many of their policies therefore making the evdo part of this letter inaccurate and I did not catch these until after the letter was sent a few days after.  I will be covering the new information in my blog post tomorrow .  You may read a copy of this letter here:  Letter to Senator Young

Instead of talking about what this router is capable of, I’m simply going to link you to Jordan’s blog for all the details and his experience.  Jordan convinced me to pick up this wireless router for my verizon wireless connection.  I was hesistant at first due to the price, but after finding an excellent deal on ebay, I decided to pick one up with 2nd day air for 200 bucks on the nose.

I was not let down when it arrived.  Out of the box, I connected my phone and computer and it immediately picked up my vx8000 model phone’s data connection and connected my network to it.

As for the failover capabilities of this router, I tested this with a super high speed connection that the University at Buffalo provides (100mbps, true LAN connection with 100Mbps speed tests).  I disconnected my phone and immediately my router started using the UB wired connection and although I changed ips, my aol instant messenger and other messengers switched immediately to the wired ub connection with no real issues.  My browsing and sessions were NOT altered in any way (I had my email open and it continued to work over the failover).

I am aware of the dynamic dns capabilities of this router, and hope to test them more fully when I get home, however I’m sure that they will work flawlessly.  I wish that dnsexit was supported, however I will likely try dyndns and like thier service.

Overall, I’d highly recommend this router to anyone who has a wireless phone with a data connection, it is just simply impressive!