EVDO Day 2: The Morning Commute Test

I'm nearing 24 hours with EVDO, and, so far, I really like it. Above in the pic accompanying this post, you can see my connection stats to date. Yesterday, while at work, I maintained a 5 hour and twenty-two minute connection that was very nice, solid and fast. The 13 minute connection after that was during the commute on the train home. The connection was pretty good during this commute, but I did notice a few times where web pages loaded slower than normal and where IM messages came through rapid-fire in bullets after several seconds of silence from the other person chatting. Then last night, at home, I was connected for an hour and 35 minutes, before I stopped and switched back over to my cable network at home. Then, this morning, I reconnected at home for about an hour and a half. The connection speeds in my apartment weren't nearly as fast as they had been at work yesterday, and depending upon the room I was in, they were really not too great at all. However, I didn't lose connection at all.

This morning, I had to drive up to 10591 from 10708 (zip codes), so I setup my trusty 15-inch PowerBook (whom I named Kurosawa, btw) in the passenger seat, launched iTunes and started streaming Internet radio at 128kbps to see how the connection held up. For the first half of the ride everything was clear with no re-buffering of the stream, but once I was about half-way to work, it started re-buffering every 15-20 seconds for a total of 37 interruptions of the stream during the trip. Still, it never disconnected during this whole trip, which surprised me, as regular cellular connection can be pretty spotty in that drive up the Sprain River Parkway. Pretty cool. I'm still impressed. The next test? World of Warcraft. Stay tuned...

UPDATE: Here's today's stats from a weak signal in a very old, thick-walled building at a different location than yesterday. Not as good as yesterday, but still better than dial-up or GPRS via the bluetooth connection with my Razr.