Verizon-Alltel Merger — Good for (not the customers)

Okay, so this is one person’s anecdotal observation. But I am prone to believe the Verizon takeover is already impacting customers in our area.

I have an Alltel phone — Motorola E815, including data/tethering plan — supplied by the TV station. It’s capable of EVDO data, and I’ve had EVDO access at home better than 70% of the time the past year and a half (I live less than a quarter mile from a Verizon tower).

I also have an Alltel data card and an Alltel BlackBerry. These get EVDO Rev. A 100% of the time at home.

The phone switches to the “D” indication about 75% of the time now, and never keeps EVDO longer than a minute.

Last night I was testing the SWEET streaming service being put together by ChaserTV.com (supposed to launch in March). It confirmed my earlier observations:

• with the data card in, I was consistently pushing 640×480, 8fps video with no frame drops and about a 4-5 second round-trip delay. 89 to 145 kbps showed by both the encoder and the data card software.
• by doing nothing but shutting down the data card and lighting up the phone connection, my frame rate dropped to 5ps, the dropped frames rolled up to about 50%, and the delay lengthened to about 30 seconds. The encoder was struggling to push 50kbps.

Unfortunately, while in data mode, the phone does not give indication which mode (EVDO or 1X RTT) it’s in. You have to hang up, and most of the time it changes status within a second after the disconnect.

I firmly believe Verizon is “turning down” the phone, or not allowing it to run EVDO data, in an effort to push people onto data cards. Now, I have not had the phone on since last season, so I don’t know when it started, so this may all be in my head. But given my previous experience with Verizon, it’s the logcial conclusion.

Oh, the BlackBerry? Didn’t test it, but the EVDO indication on the front screen never wavered during the test on the other two devices.