I've got a data plan through Verizon for my 'data' cell phone (Motorola V265 - non-defective) which allows me to tether the phone to my PDA or laptop at home. Currently, I don't have DSL or Cable available in the new house so I'm pretty much 'stuck' with what I have until Charter rebuilds my neighborhood for digital cable, or a wireless provider comes to town (not likely), or I bring in a T1 and start my own wireless company. I've toyed with the idea a lot.
Anyway, with that background information, with peak connections of 144kbit (basically a little bit better than a dual ISDN setup) over the 1xRTT network, I'm a bit bandwidth starved so it makes sense that if I want to share files from the office, it is going to be a little painful. Verizon is hoping to have EVDO in the Grand Rapids area soon and then I'll be able to upgrade to a 'real' EVDO PCMCIA card and get closer to 1Mbit.
You might wonder why I'm using a cell phone and not a PCMCIA card. There is a simple reason: Motorola has the best RF sensitivity of any phone/card offered that I have tried. I'm on 'the edge' of the signal where we live. Any PCMCIA card would get, at most, 1 bar of strength. With a V710 or a V265, I get at least 2 or 3 bars of strength and no drop outs. Attaching an external antenna helps quite a bit too if you want to make sure you get a solid '3 bar' signal strength.
With the original DFS in Windows 2000/2003, I wouldn't have bothered even trying to setup a nice DFS setup but with the compression and 'reworking' the DFS engine has gone through in R2, my data link makes a great test bed since the peak data rates can vary and so can the actual connection. At times, I feel like I'm on dialup again.
A lot of the data I transferred was the contents of a Sharepoint website sitting in C:\inetpub on NecroQuad and a few ISO images from MSDN, which amounted to around 300MB or so. As you can see from the results below, there was a good 30% reduction in overall data transfer.
For "fat pipes", that isn't a big deal. For a cell phone, it's a huge deal.
Not many branch offices run over a cell phone line but I know of a lot of places around Michigan that are still on ISDN or IDSL. This type of bandwidth reduction, and being able to schedule replication time windows easily, will be a driving force in my future R2 deployments for small businesses.
I've got more data I'm going to publish later, but I wanted to get this stuff 'live' before I have another hard drive failure on one of the test machines. That is always the double edged sword of older hardware - a lot of times you will get donated hardware or former production machines that can't be trusted, to use as test development machines. Free hardware is nice. Failing hardware is a bummer.