1200 baud modem speeds

[WayneG]

Last year I upgraded my Verizon mifi hotspot to a 7730L, supposedly one of the best you can get.
It has done well until last weekend when I was at a event in Upstate NY.

I use the hotspot for my laptop and Roku and I was getting fairly good music from Roku, but the internet was painfully slow, sometimes taking 10 min. or more to get a full page refresh on Weather Underground. Facebook and Air Forums were impossible to view.

Yes, I know, what the heck am I doing on the internet while camping?
The answer is that it was raining for about 8 hours on Saturday morning.

That is when it struck me, it is not a bad tower signal, it is a overloaded tower.
Just like me, everyone at the event was in their camper or tents, playing on their phones lurking the internet.

So, no matter how great your cell hotspot is, when you are in a remote area with minimal tower coverage for your carrier, and the weather turns to crap, expect to have poor internet service. I guess I should have gone back to bed?

[RandyNH]

Or put on your galoshes and gone outside to dance through some puddles...

[Wayne&Sam]

At the Old Songs Festival?

[WayneG]

Originally Posted by RandyNH

Or put on your galoshes and gone outside to dance through some puddles...

That is for the younger folks

[WayneG]

Originally Posted by Wayne&Sam

At the Old Songs Festival?

A slightly more rambunctious crowd at the Harley Rendezvous

[SuperSamuli]

It actually might not be overloaded tower, it could be that Verizon is slowing down hotspots - while actual mobile phone surfing still works much faster. I have experienced this many times using Verizon's hotspot.

[gklott]

Originally Posted by WayneG

I use the hotspot for my laptop and Roku and I was getting fairly good music from Roku, but the internet was painfully slow, sometimes taking 10 min. or more to get a full page refresh on Weather Underground. Facebook and Air Forums were impossible to view.

That is when it struck me, it is not a bad tower signal, it is a overloaded tower.
Just like me, everyone at the event was in their camper or tents, playing on their phones lurking the internet.

So, no matter how great your cell hotspot is, when you are in a remote area with minimal tower coverage for your carrier, and the weather turns to crap, expect to have poor internet service. I guess I should have gone back to bed?

Tower congestion is an issue in the Texas Hill Country too, especially on weekends with the much higher visitor traffic. You can see 4-bar LTE and still get terrible speed.

Did you hit the "limited-unlimited" Verizon 15 GB/mon limitation on your hotspot device and drop you back to 3G? That happens to us each month, and your description is what we normally experience.

You likely have tried this. If you have a smart phone that has a personal hotspot. Connect that way, and see if you speed improves.

We have two SIM cards in out mobile hotspot.

73/gus

[Kevinshortnh]

The 1200 baud modem was a great upgrade from the 300 baud modem!

If you have a no signal, nothing will help. A WeBoost will help if you have at least one bar.

I have a Verizon Above Unlimited plan (75GB) for working from home as a full-timer. I work for an Internet cloud infrastructure provider. I do a lot of Zoom (video) and Slack (chat) conferencing all day so I chew up a lot of bandwidth. My Jetpack hits its monthly 15GB limit pretty quickly, I get throttled to 600Kbps, then I switch to my phone hotspot - which gets throttled at 22GB.

My wife has a Verizon Beyond Unlimited (22GB) plan. So we download all the Netflix and Amazon Prime content we can whenever we have free WiFi, then we use her phone as a hotspot plus Chromecast to watch our shows.

I just added an AT&T Wireless Internet 100GB plan for when all that breaks.

[WayneG]

Originally Posted by gklott

Did you hit the "limited-unlimited" Verizon 15 GB/mon limitation on your hotspot device and drop you back to 3G? That happens to us each month, and your description is what we normally experience.

You likely have tried this. If you have a smart phone that has a personal hotspot. Connect that way, and see if you speed improves.

We have two SIM cards in out mobile hotspot.

73/gus

I tried using the hot spot with my phone and did not do any better.
My jetpack hotspot is a pay as you go unit. I only use it when traveling so I only put time on it when I am out wandering.


On that note, I had paid for 2 gigs and that went so quick I had to add another 2. I wonder if rejected packets from the overload were being charged?

The local population is under 1000, when the event is on, it adds over 5000 more

[wave man]

This is a real issue in our modern world, I’ve noticed a dramatic performance slow down of my phone’s hotspot while the phone itself does ok. I suspect it’s just the corporate desire to make us pay more for what we used to get for less. Forcing us to pay for pkgs and upgrades... just my cynical side... [emoji16]