Alltel speed increase?

leviathon713 · Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 7:15 pm Post subject: Alltel speed increase?

Has anyone else's alltel speed dramatically increased lately? I use a usb pantech 150 and a wilson trucker antenna, I haven't changed anything at all, and my speed has gone from around 1Mb DL and .10Mb Upload to this:

I wasn't going to say anything because I figured it was only temporary, but it has been this way for a little over two weeks now. I had the other speeds for almost a year then, "BLAM!" I'm on Rev. A. I know they haven't put any antennas up in the area, so I was curious if anyone else is experiencing this anywhere? BTW I'm in North Central SC...

itb44 · EVDO User Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 50

Yes, but...

I have Verizon in the northeast (now absorbing Alltel), and noticed a similar increase in download speed roughly six weeks ago (and a slight decrease in upload speed). Unfortunately, my particular download speed increase was accompanied by a terrible increase in jitter, which really hurts any real-time apps (especially those with necessarily small jitter buffers).

Since then, http://www.testyourvoip.com has been reporting 1.0 (unusable) to 2.8 (terrible), where it used to report 3.3 (good) to 4.2 (excellent). It's been bad on both upload and download. I just tested at 2.2 right after the above speed test, with latency of 731 ms and max jitter of 717 ms.

I'm still learning, but my current theory is that they added another uplink with transmitter nearby (or linked an Alltel with a Verizon), thereby nearly doubling the maximum bandwidth available under EVDO (which can use multiple transmitters at virtually the same time). Unfortunately, my device must be switching back and forth between the two uplinks or transmitters, and this probably leads to the jitter problem (even though the speeds are now blazingly fast).

I don't know if the jitter issue was unrecognized by Verizon, if they simply wanted the extra speed more, or if they might have even intended to increase jitter in order to discourage the use of real-time apps (I recall that they used to ban VoIP in the old ToS). When customers have Internet trouble, they often complain about "speed" even if the real issues are something else like latency and/or jitter. Thus, Verizon might simply have been responding to those complaints.

For my part, I've now ordered a Yagi directional antenna, and hope to direct it towards one of the old or new transmitters, but not both. Hopefully they won't turn out to be too close together from my angle. I have no idea what my speeds will actually do (although I'm prepared for them to drop), but I can hope that it will improve my jitter issue.
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AC595, WRT54G3G

JoeCHecht · EVDO Junkie Joined: 05 Jan 2008 Posts: 409

leviathon713 · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 11:44 am Post subject:

whyzeman · EVDO Heavy User Joined: 14 Dec 2007 Posts: 128

Nope. No speed increase in Southern Miss. Still getting 2-300 KBps max.