The Rover is Going Back

Today, after a bad experience with Comcast, I bought a Rover Puck wireless access point thinking I could get away from Comcast altogether. Alas, it hasn’t worked out.

Rover touts unlimited 4G Internet access with no agreement (pay-as-you-go) for only $50/month. This sounded like a great deal to me. I could cancel my Comcast service and have unlimited, fast wireless Internet access with Rover. But it was not to be.

I went to Best Buy to purchase the Rover Puck which cost $150. I then came home and charged it completely (as the instructions asked) and after charging followed the instructions to get it setup. It was very easy to setup. I was really liking it at first. However, after setup, it didn’t show any bars of service (see associated image). I was in fact able to connect to the web, but it was pretty slow. So I ran a few bandwidth tests just to see.

I ran a bandwidth test on my Comcast connection over Wifi with a D-Link wireless router and my iMac. I received a speed of 25 Mbps down and 3.3 Mbps up with a decent ping time of 52ms (cabled I received 29 Mbps down/4 Mbps up with a ping time of 22 ms - Nice!).

As you can also see in the associated image, the speed via the Rover Puck wasn’t even close. In the screenshot you can see a terrible ping time of 286ms with a download speed of only 2.97 Mbps and an upload of a horrible 0.08 Mbps. Sad.

So, needless to say, I’m going to take the Rover back to Best Buy. Hopefully the Clear 4G service in my area (and Houston over all) will get stronger and faster quick as wireless is fantastic for flexibility.