AT&T Mercury recomendations

chopdoc · EVDO Newbie Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 3

Hi, as someone real new to this type of internet service I would like to ask for some recomendations. I just purchased the AT&T service with the USB mercury. I do live in the country and AT&T shows me in the middle of a large area of G3 coverage. Sprint shows me in an area of good/fair coverage, and altel shows only a 1xRTT connection without broadband. Zip code is 70443.

Hooking it up, running 2 USB cables outside with the USB Murcury hooked up to it, (22 feet worth of cable) I am able to connect to the G3 with 2 bars and -91db connection.

I want to home network so I will need a router to supply a connection to 2 computers. What i would like to know is what is recommended to give me the best usage for the lowest price. With this I would like to run an external antenna to help my connection speed.

The primary use for my internet connection is for World of Warcraft. I have been using Wildblue services but with the more then doubling of latency in the last 3 months I had no choice but to find a new service. Currently with the AT&T service I am running anywhere from 200 to 500ms latency which is great IMHO but the frame rate is low. With an external antenna I am hoping to be able to use the full 3.6mb connection availability of AT&T with a better frame rate as well as being able to use ventrilo while gaming.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Alex · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 3:15 pm Post subject:

good luck getting "full 3.6mb" from ATT, anywhere.

here are antennas for the Mercury

which one you should get depends on signal around you.
provide answers to questions at end of this article: http://www.EVDOinfo.com/RSSI

and we can better judge what equipment will help you most.

as for the router, the least expensive option is

http://3gstore.com/CTR500

the more versatile solution (not any faster for WoW) is this one:

http://3gstore.com/MBR1000

long term, the MBR1000 will be the better investment.
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chopdoc · EVDO Newbie Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 3

For my test, where I have the Mercury outside now, I am pinging 269ms, have a 419 kbs download and a 491 kbs upload with a 94 dBm reading with 3G. When it was inside I was pinging 374 to 400, had @270 download speed and 700 upload, and 84 dBm non G3 (symbol wasnt there) that would bounce to 91 dBm and no signal at times.

Tower is within 4 miles of my house and flat terain with trees between me and the tower. I can take my laptop, about half a mile from my house I have 80dBm G3. With the Murcery outside, ocasionally G3 signal weakens and it will drop to a -77dBm non G3 signal.
For antenna coax lenght, I could probably run it with 10 to 15' of coax.

Glad to see yall accept paypal, Hopefully the CTR500 is in stock as well as the antenna you reccomend.

Alex · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 5:24 pm Post subject:

chopdoc · EVDO Newbie Joined: 03 Dec 2008 Posts: 3

Earlier today on warcraft my latency was initially 6K but settled down to bouncing between 176 to 344 with an occassional 400 ms.

A test I ran on testomy net a few mins ago

:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Download Connection is:: 1029 Kbps about 1 Mbps (tested with 12288 kB)
Download Speed is:: 126 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net/ (Main)
Test Time:: 2008/12/03 - 5:31pm
Bottom Line:: 18X faster than 56K 1MB Download in 8.13 sec
Tested from a 12288 kB file and took 97.797 seconds to complete
Download Diagnosis:: Awesome! 20% + : 29.92 % faster than the average for host (160.77)
D-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-2DCMS7LKV
User Agent:: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) [!]

My biggest concern is warcraft with ventrilo. With the Mercury inside last night they was only able to hear every 3rd word I said and my latency was around 1200ms (still faster then WildBlue) I really want to get my signal down low enough so that I can have the ability to do both. The signal indicator in my tray does say 3.6MB connection but I know that can be miss leading.