With Twin Cities AT&T customers getting an added Thanksgiving gift of LTE, I decided to run a handful of tests to see what performance looked like. This was performed on a Samsung Galaxy SIII using the app from speedtest.net. The results are pretty impressive.  Almost 40Mb/s down and over 10 Mb/s upload speeds. 

Looks like today is the day when AT&T flips the switch on full-time LTE for the Twin Cities.  I noticed back in September that the State Fairgrounds was lit up and providing some nice download speeds.  Also the U of M campus and a few other northern suburbs have been enjoying that functionality as AT&T was going through testing. I can’t find an official release on AT&T’s website, but a few media outlets are reporting this too. heraldonline.com Star Tribune Pioneer Press

Kind of a bummer for Verizon and Sprint customers who were hoping to have one of those new Windows Phone 7 devices in time for the holidays.  Initial reports indicate that Microsoft will delay the launch of an OS that will support CDMA technology in order to focus on GSM.  This is probably for good reason as CDMA is widely used in the United States, but not much at all beyond that.  GSM is the predominate technology overseas and in other foreign countries. That being said, AT&T and T-Mobile would be the first to offer the devices, while Spring and Verizon customers will have to wait till sometime in 2011, when CDMA support is rumored to be made available. "We had to make some trade-offs," senior product manager Greg Sullivan told CNET today. "Even Microsoft doesn’t have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well." (Read…

Only a week after I had purchased the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go USB card, I returned it to Best Buy, the exclusive reseller of this product. Last week, I wrote about the Broadband2Go card with somewhat of a glowing review because of the fact that it was available without a contract and actually connected through Sprint’s EVDO network. So why didn’t it survive my bag of gadgets.  It’s pretty simple.  Windows Only Support I use both a Mac and PC and most of them time I am using Windows on top of my Mac.  This means that wherever I go, I usually have my Mac with me so I can work on both personal and business-related stuff. Even though the Virgin Mobile website indicates that the system requirements include Mac OS 10.3, and the modem drivers actually install on my Mac, there is no “Connection Manager” type software.  I did manage…

I picked up a Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go USB modem for my laptop tonight.  I travel fairly regularly and like to have access to the Internet when I am on the road.  Since AT&T hasn’t enabled tethering for it’s iPhone users still, I wanted to find an aircard that would allow me to get Internet access wherever I may be. I thought about purchasing an AT&T card, but wasn’t crazy about having to sign another two year contract even though the hardware was free, or pay $60 per month for data access.  In addition, monthly data transfer was capped at 5 GB. Other vendors like Sprint and Verizon offer similar plans. The one that I found that was pretty intriguing was the offering from Virgin Mobile called “Mobile Broadband2Go”.  Virgin Mobile prides itself on not signing it’s customers up for contracts, but providing affordable hardware and service at competitive prices.  The…