Observations on 3G Hotspot stability -- my solution

[casmithva]

I purchased a Motorola Droid 2 back in late August to replace a Blackberry Storm (9530), and I, too, ran into the same problems that others have had with 3G hotspot instability.  I found numerous postings here about this with suggestions that various features be turned off, such as email syncing, IM clients, etc., before activating the hotspot application.  None of that worked for me.  I was also wondering if there were signal issues with the phone or if the tower was beyond capacity because I had noticed some service degradation with modem tethering on my Storm before abandoning it.  No way to prove it, though.

This Monday, though, I had a thought that perhaps the Linux kernel's scheduler on the phone was not giving the hotspot application enough priority, allowing it to lag and then drop service.  So I started the Terminal application on my Macbook laptop and started a ping process, to ping the phone every second -- literally, "ping 192.168.1.1" -- and just let it run.  You can run the same program on Windows by starting the COMMAND process or in Linux in the terminal process of your choice.  192.168.1.1 is the phone's WIFI-side (not the Internet-facing) IP address when the 3G hotspot service is activated.  ping is a command-line program available on Mac OS X, Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, and elsewhere that sends Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets to the specified address; this is often used for diagnostic purposes on wired and WIFI networks, to see if the remote end is available and to measure transmission latency.  The idea was that this would keep the 3G application prioritized in the phone's scheduler.  Although the Linux kernel on the phone typically handles responding to ICMP packets (at least that's how Linux works on servers), I thought that the 3G app might somehow still have to be involved.

Usual warnings about battery life and temperature apply, of course.

The end result?  No drops.  It's a hack, one that I shouldn't have to do, but so far the results speak for themselves.  I was connected on Monday for about three hours before I took it down.  Before I did this on Monday, though, I was only getting 5 - 30 minutes of connectivity.  On Tuesday with this running I was connected for almost six hours with no drops.  Today, I've only been connected for an hour so far, but no drops.  Either this ping idea helps, or Verizon fixed something behind the scenes.

Just thought I'd share this...