Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Google Home Mini's accuracy rate, Facebook and Federal regulators, VW buying an autonomous car company from Volvo, disabling rogue drones, and more.

 

Eddy in Charlotte, North Carolina listens to the podcast and asked: "I'm a truck driver, and I usually have good cell signal, but when I try to use mobile data, especially around outlying truck stops, I find the data "bitrate" for surfing the web and watching videos isn't effective and I get a lot of skipping. I'm curious whether products like the Wemo or some of the other repeaters have gotten better at that technology. I used one years ago and it didn't seem to make a difference with data. Curious if some of these newer ones have resolved the bandwidth with mobile data."

 

Eddy, signal boosters can be effective, you should probably look at the professional line, the ones meant for large vehicles like RVs, those tend to have larger and better antennas.

You should also look into buying the most appropriate one for your use, if you’re going place where LTE is not common, you may actually get better speeds by letting LTE drop and using sturdier 4G instead.

Ultimately, it always comes down to whether or not there’s anything around you to repeat. It is possible for you to have voice service and not data service, or to have EDGE service which you wouldn’t notice too much while making phone calls but certainly would when trying to stream video.

There are some services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video that will let you download some of its content to view offline, you should take a look at those too and see if those options are available to you. No one bothers with live TV these days anyway.

 

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