Friday, April 07, 2006

You Can't Get There From Here or Planes, Trains and EVDO

CTIA wrapped up for us this morning. There were some meeting glitches today that were fine considering most of the heavy lifting had been done earlier in the conference. I have to say that I never really got to spend much time on the floor but had some great meetings, conversations, and saw a couple of cool new things.

We decided to try to catch an earlier flight out of Vegas back to San Diego. Shawn had a 4 something and I had a 7 something. Being that we were at the airport around 1 ish getting on a new flight was key to avoiding a long stay in the Vegas airport. We signed up for the first flight and we were something like number 35 on the standby list. Ouch. The next two flights were delayed. Hmmm. Not looking good. Shawn says, "Want to fly to LA?" I say, "Good idea"

We scramble over to the LA gate which is just about to close and manage to get on the flight. Sweet. We get to LA around 2:30 and then catch the 4 PM train to San Diego. We get a couple of hours to work in peace on the train. Wait a minute. We go out onto the runway and wait for around 30 minutes. The train is looking bad now. Eventually we get off the ground and get into LA about 3:10PM. This isn't too bad but it means we have to cab across town to Union Station in Friday rush hour traffic which isn't impossible but the over and under is close. We make it with a couple of minutes to spare. Then the train breaks before we leave. We get a 30 minute delay and they bring a new train.

Net net I am getting home earlier than my original flights departure, which I think makes it all worth while but what a journey. The point of all this though is that this is the first time I get to try out the Sprint EVDO network on the Samsung A920 they sent me a month or two ago. So far, I am WAY impressed with Sprint's EVDO implementation. Shawn is using Verizon's EVDO Laptop card and at some point we will do a data race to see which network is truly faster.

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