Product Reviews
"It just has to work."

Verizon Wireless Broadband - 2007-07-28

- Verizon "Unlimited" Wireless Broadband
- WatchWAN Bandwidth Monitor

Verizon Wireless now provides completely wireless broadband access.

First, I've had excellent experiences with this card so far.  It routinely gets transfer speeds of 60 kilobytes/sec. The highest speed I have gotten is about 250 kilobytes/sec (using a download accelerator).  This is on par with what many other ISPs have to offer.  These are real life transfer speeds, not marketing materials.  Their marketing materials state...

"...average download speeds of 400 – 700 kbps.*"

This equates to about 50-87 kilobytes/sec, which is right on par with the real world performance I encountered.

The service costs about $60/month plus several taxes.  Please note that taxes may make a significant portion of the cost of the service.  I haven’t received my first bill yet, so I can't speak to that.  Keep in mind that these fees may only apply to wireless phones.  According to their contract agreement as of this date,

• Tolls, taxes, surcharges and other fees, such as E911 and gross receipt charges, vary by market and as of July 1, 2007, add between 4% and 34% to your monthly bill and are in addition to your monthly access fees and airtime charges.
• Monthly Federal Universal Service Charge (varies quarterly based on FCC rate) is 11.3% of interstate and international telecom charges.

The "unlimited" bandwidth is, in fact, limited.  On their site, they explain that,

"Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to limit throughput speed or immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice.”

The only problem is that the usage meter provided with the program does not accurately measure bandwidth.  After downloading Firefox, which is approximately 5 megs, the VZAccess application only reported 700KB of network traffic.  This was true even after I reinstalled Windows.  Other people have apparently had similar issues.

I installed six different bandwidth monitors, and none of them worked with my Verizon card.  The issues ranged from crashing to inaccurate measuring, or logs being reset when rebooting, but the major issue seemed to be that the bandwidth monitors could not deal with a disappearing USB adapter.  Two of the applications appeared to track the adapters by the sequence they were added to the system.  When I unplugged my USB wireless adapter and plugged it back in, these bandwidth monitors started tracking the wrong adapter (or locked up entirely).  

After installing and uninstalling various bandwidth monitors, the only one that worked with my Verizon Broadband USB device was WatchWan.  While it was more reliable and accurate than any of the others I tried, it has its own problems.  According to one user on download.com,

"Any version of WinPcap prior to 4.0.1 is vulnerable to intrusion. WatchWAN's installer pushes WinPcap 3.1b4."

This issue can be resolved by uninstalling the version of WinPCap that comes with WatchWAN, and reinstalling the latest edition.  However, there are other issues.  It causes Windows to hang for about 25 seconds during boot, and increases the RAM usage by about 60 MB.

This connection is intended to replace my land line connection, and getting exact bandwidth numbers is important.  For an explanation on why most bandwidth monitors (with the exception of WatchWAN) are inaccurate, please see this website.

"I needed an utility that would give me an ACCURATE account of my Broadband Internet usage...

Now we must understand that this is practically an impossible task.  The reason being that while it is possible to keep an eye on the data that flows between my machine and the ADSL router...the actual traffic that is being billed by the ISP is that which flows over the telephone line between the ADSL router and the ISP.

This traffic is usually carried over PPPoE protocol the overhead of which increases the size of the data that is being transferred by anywhere between 5% to 10%.

...Unfortunately, available utilities like DU Meter and Netmeter do a lousy job in doing even this.
In fact they have been reported to show the usage as being 100% MORE than what the ISP calculated."

If you're looking for a good Wireless Broadband card, and don't mind spending $60+ per month, then Verizon offers reliable and fast performance.  However, if you intend on downloading significant amounts of data, I would definitely recommend downloading a good bandwidth monitor.  Make sure that you can receive EVDO (high speed wireless) in your area.