Rusty on Radio: EVDO, Wireless Performance, Radio Remote broadcasts and violating your terms of service

As I sit here in my Las Vegas Motel Room (the Best Western Mardi Gras, selected only on the basis of price and proximity to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where NAB is taking place) I'm thinking about how bad wireless performance is in general.

Right now, I'm typing over EVDO, because the hotel internet - powered by Lodgenet's StayOnline - is completely dysfunctional ("timeout connecting to network"). This is the same StayOnline that gave us so much trouble at the Marriott in Austin when we were trying to cover SXSW. I guess I should learn never to depend on the in-room wireless internet at most hotels/motels, because if the hotel is busy at all - the network will be unusable.

But, we have an EVDO card! We bring our own bandwidth with us rather than rely on the hotel internet, because that way we can always have internet access over "Sprint's EVDO Rev. A networks with data speeds up to 3.1 Mbps!" Only it doesn't work that way. In fact, these days, we're lucky if we get 500kb down. Here's what I get from the Speakeasy Speed Test:

Not too impressive.

You see the problem happens when there are too many EVDO users. And for Sprint (like Verizon), that means all the people that have their multimedia phones. And there are more and more of those out there all the time, fighting for the finite amount of bandwidth at each cell site.

We really saw this last weekend, when we webcast from Yuri's Night. At first, the webcast worked great. We had plenty of speed. But as all the geeks started arriving for the big party that evening, the network started getting slower and slower. By 8pm, that stream (from Stage 2) rebuffered so much it was pretty much unusable.

We were doing the main stage broadcasts from WayneCo's Bus which is equipped with a Motosat satellite internet uplink, which usually only gets about 256kb max for uplinks, unless you pay a hefty additional fee (which uses multiple transponders). So we didn't have enough bandwidth to stream both from the bus, and had to resort to EVDO for the other stage.

WiFi was also out of the question. With 5 SSIDs visible, the only reliable one was the backhaul network for the ticket booths, and not connected to the internet. The public internet was so overloaded that it often disappeared for minutes at a time. And only once were we able to maintain a connection, and that was before the event started. So we couldn't WiFi between our encoding gear at Stage 2 and the bus.

Everyone is always making promises of the happy wonderful infinite bandwidth wireless future. But it's still a way off. In a crowded situation, WiFi is about as useful as a CB radio, OK for really short distances, but for useful distances (200 feet or more) it falls apart. In this case, we could barely get 40 feet out of the WiFi base station in the bus to a remote machine. Sprint's EVDO works great sometime (4am in the morning in places where there aren't many users, for example) but lately in many different places we've used it, the service is over subscribed and slow, slow, slow.

Verizon's EVDO works just as badly as Sprint.

Wayne de Geere, who graciously provided his bus as our base of operations, has a Verizon EVDO, which worked about as poorly as the Sprint one. We chose the Sprint service because of Verizon's Terms of Service actually prohibit streaming audio and/or video and updating webcams and pretty much anything actually useful you'd do with their service. Sprint's restrictions are pretty much limited to things that violate the law.

Bottom line: we should have brought lots of wire. And run 600 ohm balanced audio from the stages back to where we were. Or installed wired ethernet connections to each stage. Or used something like a Marti SRPT 30 analog remote pickup unit, the technology that terrestrial radio broadcasters have been using for 30+ years.