Jul 16th, 2010
4G Wireless in Hawai’i: For Me, a Work in Progress
As part of the #whitetwedding2010 I attended last Wednesday, 4G wireless hotspots were used to provide Internet access for the guests as well as for a live video stream for all the Internet to see.
I was in charge of making sure all of that worked. And it did, with varying degrees of headache.
One of the hotspots I used was the Sprint Overdrive, and two others were Clear USB modems with Cradlepoint (or rebranded for Clear Cradlepoint made) routers. . In Hawai’i (or at least O’ahu) we have several vendors of 4G: Sprint, Clear, and Road Runner, although they all appear to be using the same network and the same WiMax technology.
First off: the Overdrive performed very poorly–so poorly in fact that I gave up on it after messing with it for about an hour. The USB modems with Cradlepoint routers performed much better.
When we had a strong signal, the 4G worked well–perhaps not incredibly, but more than well enough for our purposes. We got download speeds approaching two megabits, but that was not really what we were looking for–we also got upload speeds about one megabit, which was what we needed for the video.
The issue, however, is that the speed was very dependent on location–a few feet in a different location would mean speed drop offs of more than 50%. The modems also take much longer to connect than the older but still prevalent 3G modems of which I have one.
For a comparison at home of how 3G vs. 4G fared, see this.
We got the results we wanted but it involved a lot of work and a lot of searching for the best location. So, while I liked the results, I’m unconvinced that at least in Hawai’i, 4G is ready for prime time.
Ryan, I’ve been meaning to ask about the cradle point and overdrive. Is there a way to see when a 4G connection drops down to 3G? On my EVO, I have seen it switch between 3G and 4G so often that I’ve given up on using 4G except when I want to test the 4G network. My speed test results are similar to yours except that I can see when it is testing 4G vs. 3G connectivity. Right now the 4G test results are not meaningfully better (if not worse) than 3G. But if Sprint fixes the issue, future speed tests need to verify which network the test uses.
Excellent and informative article on 4G! I use the Clear service and have had similar mediocre results.
Kyle (Mad Marv to the uninitiated):
I didn’t have full admin access to the Overdrive (although I certainly could have but since it was a rental I didn’t really want to do a factory reset); I did have for the Cradlepoint but I didn’t look very hard. I believe there is access to the 3G vs. 4G reception on both but if 3G was enough for the stream I’d have just run it through my Hele.
Nice to hear my results weren’t alone.
Gregg,
Thanks!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ryan M. Suenaga and Ryan M. Suenaga, Ryan M. Suenaga. Ryan M. Suenaga said: Thanks to @madmarv and @greggoh for commenting on my 4G in Hawai'i post: http://bit.ly/8XopVN [...]