EVDO Rev A in the house!! (literally)

After 3 years of suffering with 1xRTT for a home internet connection, EVDO Rev A finally went live on our local cell tower. For the past few months, our phones had been flipping back and forth between EVDO and 1xRTT but could never sustain a connection on the faster network.

That changed sometime in the past few weeks and thankfully, I was able to run down and grab an EVDO Rev A card to replace my aging and dying Motorola V265 which had faithfully pushed packets since 2004, 24x7x365.




I had been looking into Wilson repeaters and power boosters to get the distant EVDO signal but now it looks like I don't need to go through that mess. The speed difference between EVDO Rev A and 1xRTT is amazing.

I did connect an external antenna up to the Novatel U720 and it boosted my reception quite a bit. The Thinkpad 240 that I use as a router only has one USB port, so I used a powered USB hub to plug both cables from the USB modem in. The modem can operate off of just one USB port but I need all the signal fidelity I can get, so I am using the booster for 1 amp of powered goodness.

3 years of waiting for better than ISDN speeds at our house is finally over!