Today, I hit the road with my Franklin CDU-680 from 3gstore.com. As the bus left Bethlehem, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Sure, I was online and staying online, but I was only getting about 80kbps, only about twice what I got on GPRS. As we got to Quakertown, I started to quit apps, thinking I’d reboot for… well, because I was desperate. Around then, though, ping times dropped from about 700ms to about 100ms, bandwidth increased tenfold, and things got to be what I wanted. I stayed online all the way to Philly, with great speeds.

I have lost my cell phone. I think John C. thinks this was an excuse to have to get a new one. In fact, it just sucks. I’ll either have to pay full price or extend my contract, and I have no idea what phone will be tolerable.

The guys from RCN came, today, and switched our television service over to RCN. They also set up cable modem service, which will replace my longstanding Speakeasy service. Speakeasy is great, service wise, but their prices haven’t changed in ages, leaving me paying $70 per month for 1.5/384 DSL.

My EVDO modem, the Sierra AirCard 595U, was a piece of junk. It kernel panicked, for Pete’s sake! I called Sprint, today, to arrange for its return. I think it’s a sham that they say that it’s compatible with Mac OS, since it seems very problematic on Intel, which is now, I think, all that Apple sells. Worse, it’s the only USB EVDO device they sell.

The trip in this morning was miserable for EVDO connection. I could barely stay online for more than a few minutes at a time. I had at least one kernel panic. Eventually, I dialed into T-Mobile’s network over my RAZR, only to be reminded how painfully slow it is. EVDO is totally awesome… when it works.

I’ve been a Speakeasy customer for about seven years now, and a Service Electric TV customer for about as long. Come next week, though, I will no longer be either. I am switching to RCN cable TV and cable modem.

Crome mentioned to me that my upload and download speeds seemed lousy, and it occurred to me that maybe the problem was that I’d hit a server that couldn’t give me much more than 70 KB/s sustained upstream. Today, I tried DSL Reports’ speed test, not so much because I think it’s super accurate, but because I knew it would be easy, and would be able to give me a better estimate than scping from a random host.

Sprint PCS was my very first cell phone provider. Shortly after we moved back to Pennsylvania, though, I got rid of them and switched to VoiceStream. With some brief outages (while using awful Nextel phones at IQE), I’ve been with VoiceStream (now T-Mobile) since then.

Here are my examples of hateful web interface from today. I have been looking at getting an EVDO device to replace using my RAZR as a modem. This led me to poking around on the websites of both Sprint-Nextel and Verizon.

Every time I blindly click a “Contact Us” link and see Mail.app launching, my teeth itch. It takes too long, it complains about certs, and I don’t want to freaking send any mail with Mail.app anyway! Why can’t I use mutt?