Nerd Nomad

The Internet situation has proved to be a bit more of an issue since I last posted on the subject. In Pismo Beach, I had good, and reasonably reliable Internet, but since then it’s been a lot more spotty. I stayed a week in Malibu Beach RV Park, and the WiFi was reasonably good, but pretty much everywhere since then has had either no WiFi, unreliable and slow WiFi, or WiFi for an extra fee (sometimes a ridiculously expensive extra fee, and often for horrible service).

So, I’ve been giving my tethered G1 a real workout for the past few weeks. It provided slower-than-dialup edge service when I was parked on Old Rincon highway (beautiful view, but without Internet, I had to move on after one night). It worked OK at Dockweiler State Beach until a big diesel RV parked between me and the tower and caused it to drop to edge service, but it was still usable for email. Golden Shore in Long Beach had Tengo Internet (which seems to be the most common third-party WiFi service at RV parks around these parts, and they actually seem to be competent at delivering good service) and at a good price of $1/day. I was then at Huntington by the Sea, where I had a pretty decent 3G signal, but even so, speeds are in the 500Kbps range, at best, from my G1, and not good enough to even reliably watch short YouTube videos.

I did a bit more research and asking around, and found a service called Millenicom, which provides access to the Sprint network, with no contract, and an unlimited data service plan, for about $70 per month. My device arrived a few days ago, and I’ve had a chance to try it in a few locations.

At Huntington Beach, speed hovered around 1.2Mbps with ~150ms latency, which is about twice as fast as the G1 at the same location, though latency was similar. This is fast enough to watch videos on Hulu without hesitation or pauses for buffering, though I didn’t try to watch HD format videos.

I’ve been beach-hopping around LA for the past few days, along with some night time stops in Culver City and El Segundo, and I’ve seen bandwidth of the Millennicom connection range from 129Kbps up to 1.2Mbps, and with latency ranging from 120ms to 180ms, with the average in bother cases being somewhere in between. I’ve never been unable to connect (but, this is a very densely populated area, and I’d be surprised if either my phone or the new device couldn’t get 3G connectivity).

Equally importantly, the device from Millennicom (a Franklin CDU-680) has Linux drivers, making it dramatically more useful to me. Android devices can be tethered and used from Linux, but I found it tedious and cumbersome to do so. So, having supported drivers is a huge win.

A couple of notes on Millennicom as a company (rather than the network, which is provided by SprintPCS, or the device, which is made by Franklin):

They offer a number of devices on their website, but they ignored my order for a different device and sent the Franklin CDU-680. So, if you actually want a device other than the Franklin, you’ll want to do the Bring-Your-Own-Device plan rather than renting. I don’t have any serious complaints about the Franklin, and it does support Linux, but it does seem to be less well-reviewed than a couple of the newer devices. The device also seems to be a power hog. I’m pretty sure it cuts my laptop battery life by at least a third, possibly more.

Shipping was fast. They claimed delivery in five days, and it came in three. There were no disks or anything to fiddle with: the device has drivers on a USB drive built in, and they installed without a hitch. I’m a little annoyed that Windows pops up the file browser every time it returns from sleep, though, and the auto-run seems to make it happen a second time, making it doubly annoying. I’m not sure how to turn either of those “features” off, as I’m kinda stupid when it comes to Windows. So, I’m annoyed 6-8 times per day.

Another quirk of the device is that initialization is really slow. It takes about a minute for the computer to recognize that it’s plugged in after recovering from sleep or booting up, and then another 30 seconds for the Franklin connection manager software to recognize it, meaning I twiddle my thumbs all that time waiting to connect. It’s like in the olden days when one had to wait for the modem to dial and connect before doing anything. I can almost hear the dialtone and modem connection screech in my minds ear, as it plods along finding the device and connecting.

The service worked as soon as I hooked up the device, and with no hassle. It works for every protocol and port I’ve tried (I use 10000 for Webmin, 22 for ssh, 80/443 for web, and IMAPS and SMTPS for mail). Some WiFi in parks has restricted some ports, so it’s good to know I have a reliable means of working.

So, I think Internet has been sorted out properly, at least as long as I’m in the US.