Verizon EVDO Aircard Speed Testing

In the quest for mobility and to be a more useful computer guy, I signed up for Verizon's BroadbandAccess program. I got a USB EVDO modem that I've got running in either of two laptops. One of which runs Windows XP and the other that runs Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Before I went ahead and signed up, I went looking for data on the speeds I could expect from either Verizon or AT&T. I didn't find much for the local area but one forum post did mention >1 megabit download speeds very near me using Verizon.

Now that I have the service, I decided to start testing and map my results. The product is here in the form of a Google Map. At each test point, I ran Speakeasy's Speedtest (http://speakeasy.net/speedtest) and recorded the download and upload speed. The markers are color coded for download speed only with Green > 1 Mbit, Yellow > 0.3 Mbit and Red < .3Mbit. If you click on a marker you'll see the download speed in kbps in the title and the upload speed in kbps below that. All testing was done in Windows XP.


View Larger Map

Overall, I'm very pleased with the service but I would like to see something similar done with AT&T's 3G in the same area.

Fixed: Remote SSH Command Failing

One great way to use SSH is to run a single command on a remote server like this:

ssh user@host command

'command' here can be anything and the text output will be piped back to your local terminal.

I was having a problem with a few servers where this wasn't working. Turns out the problem was this line in my user's .bashrc

[ -z "$PS1" ] && exit 0

In this case, the -z tests "$PS1" (the prompt string) for null. Since the prompt was null, .bashrc exited on me. After removing that line, all was fine. If you know a better way to work around this or some very important reason the -z line should stay, feel free to leave a comment.