While traveling I managed to find fairly strong 4G LTE signal in Berkeley, Los Gatos, and San Francisco. I spent about five days testing Verizon’s 4G LTE with the LG VL600 USB modem and that is not much compared to the eight months I have had with Sprint’s 4G WiMax, which runs on Clearwire’s network. A statistics section contains details about bandwidth usage, connection duration, and live graphs for current data transfer speeds. The application displays signal strength, offers a text messaging tool, and lets you search for nearby WiFi hotspots. Although the program looks somewhat outdated, it got me connected within a few seconds. Once I was setup, I simply launched the VZAccess Manager and hit “Connect WWAN” to get online. The process was not too confusing or tedious. After downloading, it took about 10-15 minutes to install the drivers and upgrade the modem’s firmware. I was glad to find downloads for the last three iterations of Windows, but there was no support for Mac users yet. The VZAccess Manager and a separate Firmware Upgrade Tool for the modem added up to about 100 megabytes of data. Despite the plug-and-play nature of USB devices, I had to manually install software and drivers to get the modem working.Īlthough a CD ships with the packaging, I headed to Verizon’s website to get the latest versions. As soon as I snapped it into my Windows 7 laptop, I quickly realized why customers prefer the latter: drivers. I had not used a USB modem in over a year since portable WiFi hotspots such as the 3G MiFi became all the rage. I managed to get my hands on the LG VL600 USB 4G LTE modem and the speeds had my jaw dropping within no time. There were a total of ten 4G devices including smart phones, tablets, and portable hotspots announced at CES 2011, but none are available just yet. While coverage is somewhat limited compared to Sprint’s WiMax 4G network, Verizon Wireless announced plans to expand into an additional 140 markets by the end of this year. In December 2010, Verizon Wireless launched their next generation 4G LTE network in 38 major cities across the country including 60 airports.
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