PDANet Vs Droid Mobile Hotspot?

[larz]

I'm trying to decide whether or not to buy PDANet or just use the Droid as a hotspot when using my laptop? is there a signifcant speed difference?

 

[1088933]

Not sure on the speed, it might be pretty close. The big difference will be money

Test them both out and let us know!

 

[jpdaballa]

from my experience using any phone, the wire is a little bit faster then wirelessly, so i think pda net would be faster.

 

[kajii]

I know its been asked, but is there a chance of verizon catching you using pda net and making you pay?

 

[Cory Streater]

They aren't going to mess with you if you're not using excessive amounts of data. There is certainly nothing in the packet itself that identifies you as using PDANet.

 

[kajii]

if anything it would only be to browse sites, which I guess is exactly what I do with the X.
Hmmm, I guess I'm good so long as I avoid using it for gaming.

 

[canton]

I'm trying to decide whether or not to buy PDANet or just use the Droid as a hotspot when using my laptop? is there a signifcant speed difference?

The biggest difference might be whether or not it *works*.

I'm a Verizon MiFi customer (dedicated mobile hotspot device) and I bought a Droid X and am ready to pay an early termination fee on my MiFi if I can get the Droid X mobile hotspot feature to work properly.

Unfortunately, my $20/mo droid x mobile hotspot connection dies after about 10 minutes of use. (Sometimes as little as 1 minute, sometimes as long as 15 or 20 minutes, but never longer.)

All is well and then suddenly my hotspot connection dies and droid's notifications pane reads:

"Mobile hotspot Service
3G Data Link Lost"

I don't think it's my environment/setup. The Verizon MiFi device works great. I've got 4 bars of 3G in an area with very little competing wifi traffic. I'm doing very light Internet over the hotspot (usually just running PING to see how long before it craps out.) Things I have tried:

• rebooting the droid, pulling out its battery
• turning off WEP on droid's hotspot network, trying different WiFi channels
• running the hotspot with the droid plugged into a power source, or not

Do I have a bad phone?

Has anyone else been able to get the $20/month mobile hotspot feature to stay alive for hours at a time? Really essential to my working environment and I'd hate to have to go back to the more expensive MiFi. ($45/mo for 200 MB instead of $20/mo for 2,000 MB)

I'd also like to know if anyone's gotten PDANet to work reliably on a Droid X (and preferably in concert with Mac OS X).

Thanks.

 

[CaDub1]

PdaNet (via USB) vs 3g Mobile Hotspot (via wif)

I'm trying to decide whether or not to buy PDANet or just use the Droid as a hotspot when using my laptop? is there a signifcant speed difference?

I just did a quick test to compare the throughput of these two different connection methods: 1) PdaNet (via USB), and 2) Verizon's 3g Mobile Hotspot app (via wifi). This quick test was to the Speakeasy Speedtest LA server from Newport Beach, CA. I ran 5 speedtests on each of the two connection methods.

Conclusions:
- The only thing I can say definitively from this quick comparison is that during the time I did the speed tests, the upstream on PdaNet (via USB) was almost twice as fast as the VZ 3G mobile hotspot (via wifi).
- During this brief comparison, the downsteam throughput with PdaNet (via USB) was 22% faster than the VZ 3G mobile hotspot (via wifi), but the downstream throughput varied quite widely over these 5 test runs, with some outlier scores skewing the average downstream throughput. I suspect the two methods would provide fairly similar downstream throughput if I ran more samples.



Speed Test Results - Connected via PdaNet (wired USB connection to Droid X)
1) 1,225kbps downstream, 464kbps upstream
2) 782kbps downstream, 507kbps upstream
3) 1,460kbps downstream, 614kbps upstream
4) 1,366kbps downstream, 425kbps upstream
5) 1,190kbps downstream, 508kbps upstream
AVERAGE: 1,204kbps downstream, 503kbps upstream


Connected via VZ 3g Mobile Hotspot App (wifi connection to Droid X)
1) 420kbps downstream, 290kbps upstream
2) 1,080kbps downstream, 320kbps upstream
3) 1,256kbps downstream, 144kbps upstream
4) 911kbps downstream, 288kbps upstream
5) 1,266kbps downstream, 322kbps upstream
AVERAGE: 986kbps downstream, 272kbps upstream