{"id":511,"date":"2012-09-08T12:16:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T16:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/vz-4g-vs-att-dsl-lowndes-county-georgia-2012-09-08.html"},"modified":"2012-09-08T12:16:25","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T16:16:25","slug":"vz-4g-vs-att-dsl-lowndes-county-georgia-2012-09-08","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/vz-4g-vs-att-dsl-lowndes-county-georgia-2012-09-08.html","title":{"rendered":"VZ 4G vs. AT&T DSL, Lowndes County, Georgia, 2012-09-08"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nIt turns out you can’t yet buy\n\nVerizon’s HomeFusion Broadband 4G wireless Internet service<\/a>\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\nin Georgia.\n(You can buy it in Tennessee.)\nHowever, in Georgia, you can buy one of several 4G LTE devices\nthat have most of the same capabilities.\nFor example, I have here a\n\nVerizon Jetpack\u2122 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi\u00a9<\/a>,\nwhich is about the size of a pack of cards.\nA few minutes ago I compared its speeds directly with AT&T 3Mbps DSL.\nHere are the results.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe MiFi I’ve got is a slightly older model of the one pictured\nabove, because for years\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n\"AT&T<\/a>\n
\nAT&T DSL\n<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
\n\n\"VZ<\/a>\n
\nVerizon 4G\n<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nI’ve been using it and its predecessors\non road trips, for Skype, web browsing, blog posting, etc.\nIt’s also come in very handy as a\n\nplan B home Internet access method<\/a>\non the many occassions when AT&T’s DSL has flaked out.\nMostly I did not use it for uploading videos or watching them much,\nbecause until recently it was relatively slow,\nusing\n\nEVDO technology at about 1Mbps down and 0.7Mbps up.<\/a>\nSuddenly, the MiFi has gotten much much faster, ten times faster,\nbecause Verizon has turned on their 4G LTE service in Lowndes County,\nat least for mobile access.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe tables show results using\n\nSpeakEasy Speedtest<\/a> a few minutes ago.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>Megabytes\/sec<\/th>Megabits\/sec<\/th><\/tr>\n
<\/th>\ndown<\/th>up<\/th>\ndown<\/th>up<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
AT&T DSL<\/th>\n2.66Mbps<\/td>\n0.31Mbps<\/td>\n322KB\/sec<\/td>\n38KB\/sec<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Verizon 4G<\/th>\n10.88Mbps<\/td>\n7.14Mbps<\/td>\n1360KB\/sec<\/td>\n893KB\/sec<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\nVerizon’s 4G LTE is way faster,\nas in\n\n\n4 times as fast on download as AT&T’s alleged 3Mbps DSL\nand 24 times as fast on upload.\nThat means minutes instead of all night to upload videos of a one-hour meeting.\n\n<\/a>\nIt’s also faster than AT&T’s or Mediacom’s in-town 6Mbps speeds.\n<\/p>\n

\nThose VZ 4G speeds are actually faster than\n\nthe big city 4G speeds PCWorld found in May.<\/a>\nAnd Verizon’s 4G is way more reliable than AT&T’s DSL.\nMultiple times we’ve had\n\nhorrible protracted DSL technical problems<\/a>\nsometimes going on for months, requiring many hours of voice-mail hell to get\nanybody at AT&T to stop trying to blame it on the customer and actually\ndo something to fix the problem.\nNot once did AT&T ever even rebate anything on the bill for the time\nthey were not providing usable service, although they did offer\nmore time in voice-mail hell to try to get their billing department\nto do so.\nThat’s right, mighty AT&T apparently hasn’t figured out how to\nconnect their technical and billing departments.\nTalking to somebody in the nearby subdivision where they have AT&T fiber Internet,\nthe “service”, similar problems apparently exist even there,\nresulting in VZ 4G being the preferred choice for some residents.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nNow, is this an ad for VZ 4G LTE as the solution to all our Internet access\nproblems here in south Georgia?\nNo, it is not.\nAt\n\n$60\/month and up<\/a>\nit still costs too much for many people who live here.\nIf Verizon successfully gets many people to switch, they can raise prices further.\nAs more people use this service, will VZ add capacity fast enough to keep those speeds that fast?\nVZ already has data caps on their end-user\nservice, which is more like cable TV than the way\nthe Internet has historically worked.\n\n<\/a>\n\nAT&T apparently also has 4G in Lowndes County<\/a>; I just happen\nto have a Verizon 4G device for historical reasons.\nWith both AT&T and VZ’s 4G, there are coverage issues.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo, no, VZ 4G is not the solution to all our Internet access problems.\nWe could still use\n\ncounty-wide broadband.<\/a>\nWe could still use\n\nsome strategies for Lowndes County.<\/a>\nBut at least VZ 4G is a fast Internet option that actually works out here\nin the edge of the county.\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It turns out you can’t yet buy Verizon’s HomeFusion Broadband 4G wireless Internet service in Georgia. (You can buy it in Tennessee.) However, in Georgia, you can buy one of several 4G LTE devices that have most of the same capabilities. For example, I have here a Verizon Jetpack\u2122 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi\u00a9, which […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[1351,1749,883,515,1352,8701,8791,507,8741,8702,12,7,8800,605,1534,6,516],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-access-speed","tag-4g","tag-8-september-2012","tag-att","tag-cable","tag-coverage","tag-georgia","tag-hahira","tag-internet","tag-internet-access-speed","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-television","tag-tv","tag-uverse","tag-valdosta","tag-verizon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-8f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}