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Online Via EDGE

I am in Washington, D.C., in a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, and am posting this message via EDGE (AT&T’s GPRS data service, see http://www.attwireless.com/speed/). I have a PC Card in my notebook, a little antenna pointing upwards, and am online. I am not getting the expected 100K+ throughput, (I don’t know exactly what it is yet, I need to find a good way to measure it) but this feels significantly quicker than GPRS via my cell-phone. Fun stuff (especially with an unlimited data plan).

5 responses to “Online Via EDGE”

  1. Waldo Smeets Avatar
    Waldo Smeets

    Ben, just out of interest; what is the cost of a unlimited data plan?
    I am having a GPRS service here in the Netherlands and it’s really expensive, but I love it (it’s a live saver to me!).
    Here I have a max of 25 mb per month (that’s the most available, we don’t have unlimited) and the costs are almost 50 euros per month. Not to mention that it’s only 40 kbps. And I can tell you that 25 mb is not a lot, even at 40 kbps 😉

  2. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    I pay $70/month for unlimited data.

  3. Bob Sifniades Avatar
    Bob Sifniades

    Ben: There are many web pages designed to measure your connection speed. Try one of these:
    http://homepage.eircom.net/~leslie/testpage.htm
    http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp
    http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/Bandwidth.asp

  4. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    Would you recommend this as your only data service? Replacing home DSL?

  5. Aaron Avatar
    Aaron

    Ben, what do you think about Bob’s question?
    Is it something we should consider doing as a replacement for our home DSL connection?

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