My Gear

dshen,
I have the verizon broadband card also but can't stream YouTube videos without them freezing up. What's the difference between mine and yours?

What freezes up exactly? What OS do you have?

I also have some streaming issues with my Verizon/Curitel combo. I am running Win XP with Norton SystemWorks/Antivirus. I've thought about the antivirus software as a possible conflict, but I only have a problem in certain locations.

By freezing up, dshen is referring (I'm assuming) to poor buffering. The videos will start playing but the buffering doesn't keep up, as a result, the video pauses until the buffering is "adequate" again and resumes playing. But this happens multiple times throughout a video. Sometimes It can freeze up so many times during a play that it is stopping between every other word of dialog...really annoying. My work around is to let the video start playing and then pause it, wait for it to completely load (indicated in YouTube by a red bar), then start it over. However it can take up to 10 minutes to load.

My guess is that the problem is with a Verizon signal that keeps fading in and out. When you start playing the video, YouTube thinks "okay this computer is downloading at this speed so I only need to have x amount of buffering to keep up", but then the connection slows and the buffering wasn't enough.

I've found that I get a flawless connection in many places and the streaming isn't usually an issue, but at home I have weird signals that always cause streaming to freeze. The signal fluctuates between full Broadband to weak NationalAccess and sometimes a complete drop, all while sitting in the same place.

What frustrates me is that this shouldn't be an issue if you are staying in one place...the signal should only change when you move (or the occasional car parks in your driveway or something). I sit with my Verizon cell phone next to me and its signal is stable (EVDO/1X-broadband speed). My understanding was that the pc cards get their signal from the same tower as the cell phones. This fluctuation usually only happens at home (which is designated as a broadband area).

This has been going on for over a year now and I always install updates, but I admit I've been too lazy to call Verizon about it. Now that I've already typed all this up I may as well just email them :) My parents were once having a lot of problems with their Verizon cell phone signals so they called Verizon and it turns out that a cell tower down the street was programmed wrong...a day later their cell phones worked perfectly.

I suggest calling or emailing Verizon and asking them to check your cell tower.

I'd also look into the Venturi software that comes with Verizon BroadbandAccess, maybe that's an issue.

(Sorry if this is hard to follow but I don't know any special formatting tricks to make the quoted text stand out from mine)

I did some browsing and found a thread that FIXED MY STREAMING PROBLEM (http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=63756). I followed this advice about setting up a dial-up connection:

"I have this card, it has latency and hanging problems, but they're all verizon's software...
set up a dial up networking:
number: #777
name: yournumber@vzwq3.com
password: vzw

after I removed the verizon manager and venturi I tested my speed at dsl reports and got:
Your download speed : 828 kbps or 103.5 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 114 kbps or 14.3 KB/sec.
and my latency is gone."

However, I didn't need to remove VZAccess Manager or Venturi (I just disabled Venturi and didn't open VZAccess Manager).

I tested my speed before and after at www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest. I went from 91.4 kilobits per second to 471.6 kilobits per second. Since I don't have VZAccess Manager open I can't see if my signal is fluctuating like it did before. But I went to YouTube and played a few videos of 10+ minutes flawlessly (it used to freeze up on even a 30 second video). AMAZING!

One word of caution (also from the same thread):

"Now, it is true that you can use Verizon's EVDO service without the Verizon's software. The Curitel card is just a modem, after all. However, there's a big "gotcha" involved that you're overlooking. Verizon is going to be upgrading EVDO in several steps, and the word is that it will include firmware updates for the PC5740. Of course you'll never know about the upgrades unless you're running the Verizon software which checks. Since those upgrades will be Verizon-proprietary, you probably won't see them out on the Internet."

That's why I opted not to remove VZAccess Manager. I figure I can just run the program periodically to check for updates.

P.S. In my first post I meant to say "By freezing up, Mike is referring (I'm assuming) to poor buffering", not dshen...but you probably already figured that out.

Thanks Jessica for that amazing post!