EVDO – Blogging at 50+ MPH

MacWorld is in San Francisco this week and I had a chance to go up for a Geek Brief meetup this evening. It is on days like today that I appreciate that I have an EVDO card for my laptop. For those of you not familiar with EVDO it gives me an internet connection through the cell system even when traveling, as I am now, on CalTrain between San Francisco and San Jose. So I have been chatting with a good friend from high school for the last 10 minutes while riding past Redwood City and now I am blogging as I pass Menlo Park.

I have even uploaded podcasts via an EVDO connection before. Upload speeds are much slower than download. Once it took me nearly an hour to upload a 35 minute podcast. But when you consider that I was in a car on highway 101 and stayed connected to my companies VPN for that hour even though I was traveling 65 MPH, that’s not half bad.

Certainly there are faster connections available, but having a connection that is more ubiquitous than Wi-Fi is a very nice thing. On the MacWorld show floor there is free wi-fi, but with so many iPhones and MacBooks you are luck to get a decent connection. Now if I only had a MacBook Air and 5 hours of battery life. Fortunately, CalTrain has power outlets.