Endless Weather Is Scott's Blog

After chasing with Ben Holcomb on Friday in western Nebraska and seeing how well his Verizon card performed I was motivated to make the switch. Although the price of my Sprint card can’t be beat I am sick of seeing my Blackberry on EVDO while the datacard is still 1x.

Verizon had a new product called the MiFi router $99 after MIR, it’s made by Novatel wireless just like a typical aircard.
The purchase went pretty quick the Alltel/Verizon rep in training was having some problems getting the proper barcode scanned and us out the door, I was reminded about the 5GB data cap and how it was “more than enough” ha.

As we were leaving for what would end up as a cap bust I was excited to get it running, got it out of the box and a couple of instruction sheets included, “For activation see the quick start guide”… there was no such guide in the box.
The activation process was a complete cluster fu*k, made to be 10x harder than it should have been. The device is WiFi however you still need to tether it to the PC to activate it, the Verizon connection manager software was stored on the device so that was a bonus, the down side… A proprietary USB cable! WHY!!!

Come on everyone has 10+ of the typical USB cables around and yet they use this flat one, this is officially the 4th USB cable type in my collection now.

The device has a battery that seems to be able to easily power it for at least 4 hours, downside is there is no DC power supply. With the silly port you can’t even use a cell phone charger, only the USB or AC brick.
As an added bonus I could not leave my Sprint software on my machine with the Verizon, this really irked me since the Verizon card is WiFi and once activated it I would have zero use for the Verizon connection manager. Of course the device would not activate and took about a hour before we could get data flowing.

Performance:
There is no external antenna port! I knew this going in but I hoped it would all be good, it was not.
In well populated areas the device worked well, on a trip to southern KS I found myself resetting the device every hour to gain a connection, this is without streaming and only using GR3 and Spotterchat. My Spint card I can easily stream OMA to OKC without a drop so this was unimpressive.

The device can only WiFi 5 computers and would be ok for in a car, prob not for your house with devices like Tivo and so on there are no wired ports. The range is good as I can get most places in my house and use the WiFi.

In closing:
What I was really looking for was a all in one device that did not require a PC reboot every time it crashed, I achived that however the performance was so lackluster I have to say stay away.

Pick up a device such as the Cradlepoint router and a standard USB EVDO card, I think you will be much happier.
It’s going back to Verizon, and why the plastic is still on the device.

Pros:
Very small device, about the size of 1/2 a deck of cards
All in one
Wifi
Battery Powered

Cons:
No external antenna jack
Activation was far to hard
USB port is non standard
No DC powersupply (and as of this writing none offered)