Verizon "BroadbandAccess" EV-DO and poker

[theantelope]

Does anyone here have Verizon's EV-DO 3G wireless internet service? I'm lucky enough to live in a city where they're testing it. How do you like it? Can you use it to play on-line poker (i.e., are the ping / response times fast enough)?

Thanks.

[Thorpedo]

I currently roam around the country alot, and I used wi-fi alot but that was really starting to get bad when i was at starbucks all the time playing poker. So in November I bought and paid 300 and something and 80 a month for EVDO which is the same as CDMA-2000 with EDVO in. Lets just say I had termendous trouble at first in San Diego and Las vegas getting the EDVO to stay in EDVO mode. I always went back to the 1xRT mode which is a true 120k a sec or roughly 2 dial up. Which is fine for 4 tabling party poker. But edvo was nice because no lag except for around 280-320 ms lag with 540-630 ms for the slower 1xrt. But I am now more stable and use cox high speed, and much happier. when you connect to edvo exspect to lose connect in "dormant" mode for around 20 to 70 secs while it transitions from edvo to 1Xrt. THIS SUCKS. Because 4 tabling you see the establishing connection and get timed out and lose all disconnect protect. This was horrible since i play 10/20 6 max 4 tabling and it could cost me big especially if it happened while i had hands in all 4 games. I do not recomend Verizon edvo and am currently trying to get out of my 2 year contract. EDVO when it works does get around 50-60KB a sec and can download a 1 meg file in around 12 secs which is very very good. But signal strength matters. And I have tested it in 7 major us cities with it and have experience the same problem and even made them send me a new card. It is not designed to stay connected all the time, and if it sense no "Internet explorer" connects, it will go into "dormant" mode which is suppose to save on battery power. Overall very very frusterating and hours and hours spent with teir 3 tech support trying to figure it out and they answer in the end was "developing technology." Hope this helps, anymore questions feel free to ask.

-Thorpedo

[theantelope]

Great, thanks for your very helpful, informative post.

[theantelope]

Do you think that using one of those programs that constnatly refreshes Internet Explorer would work to keep the connection alive in EV-DO mode?

[Thorpedo]

No, I it will not work, and the reason is because it goes by, and get this "data transfer amounts." Thats what support says. trust me its not worth the hassle unless you like to call party and get your disconect protects reset and screaming about why it happens at the worst possible times and also slow. 1xrt or old generation works ALL the time and never gets disconnect EVER! So if you want to play poker anywhewhere on there network you can, its when you start getting into the EDVO that you get into trouble. So if you can handle 2x dialup then you can play without problems. If you want 55 to 70x 56k then thats where you will have problems. I even went as far as having a constent dtream through itunes 128k stream just to see if that worked or helped and lasted longer but after about an hour or hour and half, BAM disconnect and back to 1xrt. very very frusterating but i will let you make up your mind.
best of luck,

-Thorpedo

[theantelope]

So is there some way to keep it in 1x mode, so that I can play poker without getting dropped?

[Thorpedo]

No, not with the cards you can buy today which will be a sierra wireless 5220 card. Once you in 1xrt you stay until you reconnect, You will want to be EDVO tho because unless you like dial-up speed and lag your will want to shoot yourself.
-Thorpedo