This weekend Fritz is moving into a rented room up in Titusville. The money he will be saving on commute costs and vehicle wear (not to mention hours of his life gained) certainly justify this switch. He'll still be our housemate on weekends, until the house sells that is. But this arrangement should work out great for everyone involved.

With Fritz gone during the week, it no longer makes sense for us all to be splitting the costs for premium cable TV / and high speed Internet. So rather than dropping back to basic service, serolynne and I are contemplating cutting the cable entirely.

I just switched our half of the house network to use our Sprint Novatel Merlin EX720 and CradlePoint CTR-350 Router as our upstream connection, instead of the cable modem.

And we really can't notice any performance difference whatsoever.

Music and videos stream just fine, and the net feels just as fast as it ever has on BrightHouse Cable.

Since last year, it looks as if Sprint has upgraded the local wireless to a full EVDO revA signal. And that rocks.

According to the DSL Reports Speed Test, this is the performance we are currently getting via wireless:

Download Speed: 1199 Kb/s
Upload Speed: 240 Kb/s
Latency: 94ms

The cable modem tests out much faster (6033 Kb/s, 464 Kb/s, 62ms) - but in day to day use, it hardly seems noticeable. We'll be keeping our eye out for any hiccups - but very likely by this time next week we will be cutting off cable entirely.

This setup works amazing well. And the best part? We can take it with us (almost) anywhere!! *grin*