The reason that the unit gets hot and has short battery life is due to the way celular units work. in strong signay area.s the unit puts out the minimum power it is capable of generating. This can be as low as 1 mw. in low signal area's the power goes up until it is at it's maximum power which can be depending on the unit as high as 3W. Needless to say 1mw uses a lot less battery than 3 watts. Due to power overhead not used by the transmitter the life is not a linear increase as the power goes down. but a 4-1 varience in life can be expected over the complete range in signal levels. Don
--- On Fri, 6/5/09, Michael Mee <[email protected]> wrote: From: Michael Mee <[email protected]> Subject: [SCFN] [Fwd: [IP] two weeks with the MiFi] To: "SoCalFreeNet.org General Discussion List" <[email protected]> Date: Friday, June 5, 2009, 7:39 AM Interesting - a hotspot WiFi <-> Verizon EVDO device sold by Verizon. I remember a couple of SCFN people hacking this together with a soekris board and pcmcia card a few years back :-) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [IP] two weeks with the MiFi Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:56:44 -0400 From: David Farber <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] To: ip <[email protected]> References: <[email protected]> Begin forwarded message: From: Craig Partridge <[email protected]> Date: June 5, 2009 8:03:05 AM EDT To: David Farber <[email protected]>, Will Leland <[email protected]>, [email protected] , [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Vince Cipriano <[email protected]> Cc: Craig Partridge <[email protected]> Subject: two weeks with the MiFi Several folks asked me for my experience with the Verizon MiFi. I have had it for a bit over two weeks now and been able to use it in a range of environments including three airports (Detroit, Washington National, and Boston), and a variety of locations in the Michigan, Washington DC and Boston areas. For those who haven't seen the advance reviews, the MIFI is a credit- card sized wireless hub connected to the Internet through Verizon's EVDO service. The simplest way to think of it is a wireless hub that works just about anywhere a cell phone would work. It supports up to 5 concurrent WiFi clients. It costs $100 (after rebate and if you sign up for a two-year plan) and offers three plans: a low usage domestic plan, a higher (5GB/mo) usage domestic plan and an international plan (not mentioned in the reviews I saw but quoted to me at the store). Verizon quotes these as $40/$60/$120 respectively but after taxes and fees are added in, for me, the $60 plan became a $70 plan. My experience so far has been generally positive, with a few glitches. If you have 5 bars for EVDO connectivity, you usually experience excellent WiFi service, comparable to or better than your typical hotspot, and the battery life appears to be close to the advertised 4 hours (the longest continuous use time for me was about 2 hours and I had not reached 1/2 battery strength). Things were less happy if EVDO connectivity was less good (in Verizon's defense, it took effort to find such locations). I managed to spend several hours in a location where I had zero/one bars yet had carrier -- nicely enough WiFi still worked but, unsurprisingly, it was highly bursty and the loss rate was high (6% measured). A surprise was that the MiFi became noticeably hot to the touch and depleted its battery in about 90 minutes. My summary -- wonderful when connectivity is good (which it usually is) and workable but a challenge when connectivity is bad. Note none of my tests involved more than one WiFi client at a time. Three other observations. You can plug the MiFi into your laptop's USB port and it will work as a modem and draw power from the laptop (I didn't check to see if others can still see the MiFi as a WiFi hub in this mode). So battery life is not the critical feature you might imagine. On a Mac, the accompanying software package (which, so far as I can tell, you only need to get cumulative usage statistics so you know when you are getting close to your monthly data limit) only worked with the MiFi plugged into the USB (which may be a configuration error on my part) and tends to hang. Simpler to simply use the (unadvertised) web interface (http://192.168.1.1/). Last, while the overall MiFi packaging is sturdy (nice in a small device likely to get bounced around), the USB connector is one of those USB A- > mini B connectors used in cameras and does not feel robust (it requires considerable force to plug the mini-B connector into the MIFI and my guess is it may not survive two years of frequent plugging/ unplugging -- I'm going to look for a better cable (in the hopes that reduces strain) and failing that, buy the monthly insurance). Overall I'm pleased. Obviously this is just my personal experience and your mileage may vary. Craig ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com _______________________________________________ SoCalFreeNet.org General Discussion List To unsubscribe, please visit: http://socalfreenet.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_socalfreenet.org
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