Cellular Wins at the DNC

Posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2004 5:08 PM

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I sent Dave an email a week or so back and told him how great I thought it was that had the opportunity to blog at the Democratic National Convention. I also pointed out that relying on WiFi was probably a very bad idea, and sent him some links to Verizon and Sprint's CDMA 2000 1x wireless networking cards. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and worth the investment. Dave had some trouble with Sprint's online store and I was wondering if he actually got the card or not. Looks like he did and it looks like I was on the money:

I'm in Flint Center, it's been an incredible ordeal to get in here. Lots of mazes to walk, a big security check, up on the seventh floor looking down on the floor of the convention as they're testing and rehearsing stuff. The WiFi doesn't work, and there's no place to plug in for power. I'm uploading this via a Sprint wireless modem. BTW, I remembered to bring a power strip with me.

Another BTW, you heard it here first, the song of the convention is Johnny B Goode. Get it? John Kerry, John Edwards. Go Johnny go! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Also thanks to Russ Beattie for insisting that I get the Sprint wireless modem.

Rock on! No problem Dave, I'm glad to have helped!

Though, I will predict that once that place fills up with 20,000+ attendees (5,000 delegates and 15,000 reporters I read) you may still have problems connecting, but hopefully Sprint has done what it needed to do to shore up the coverage. Probably during major happenings when everyone is calling home "Hey Mom! Yeah, I'm here on the floor! I'm waving! Do you see me?" is when the connection will be hardest to get.

This'll be an interesting test. In theory, CDMA technology shares the same bandwidth for both data and voice and thus should scale in this situation very well. If you can get a dial tone, you should be able to connect to the net, right? GPRS (what GSM systems use for wireless data) has only a few available slots which would fill up quickly and thus would probably be saturated and useless. I've had this happen in a crowded mall on my 6600. But CDMA 2000 1x should hopefully be more reliable - especially when using a dedicated cellular networking card. Any wireless networking experts want to wade into this and correct me? :-)

Anyways, I'm very excited for this convention. Go, Go Johnny Go!

-Russ

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