Blog

Over the holiday break I had the chance to really put 3G networks and mobile connectivity to the test while en-route driving between Illinois and Florida.  I was working with my MacBook Pro connected via WiFi to a CradlePoint WiPipe access point that had my Sprint broadband USB adapter in place.  The WiPipe did a great job keeping a good connection up and running (it seemed to be much better about forcing a reconnect when things got really slow than the Sprint drivers on the MacBook Pro with the USB dongle plugged in directly).

First up was an iChat video chat with folks in Florida.  iChat provided an amazingly clear video conference while driving through Indiana (outside Indianapolis I believe). The data rates averaged out to about a 30KBytes/second download and 12KBytes/second upload. On the other end they were able to clearly make out not only us in the car but the outside scenery as I rotated the laptop to point out the windows.

To continue the torture testing I pulled down a NetFlix video on demand for viewing.  It took about 3 minutes to start with the initial buffering but it worked and the video quality was acceptable (definitely not an HD experience but better than VHS).  Video on demand while driving across the country is very do-able.

And finally I had to try out something on the gaming front. Having just thrown Diablo II onto this laptop, I fired it up, called my brother back in Illinois and played multi-player online for about 30 minutes.  Even with the cell network lag the game was completely playable.

Overall mobile connectivity is really getting to the point where deeper interactivity is available from just about anywhere, including a moving vehicle heading cross country.