So I’m headed down to South Padre Island for some downtime with the family before Christmas. We made a pit stop at the Flagstop Café and my mom noticed that there was a big sign in the window advertising the availability of WiFi.
So naturally I pulled out my HTC Touch Pro, which has WiFi, to see what network they were running on. After registering for an account on the hotspot provider (Less Networks, never heard of them) I checked whatismyip.com to see who I was on. Sure enough, the connection there was GVTC, registered as “Guadalupe Valley Telephone”. Right before we pulled out of the place I opened up my laptop, logged into the WiFi network that way and did some tests. Here’s what I got for a traceroute:
traceroute to softlayer.com (66.228.118.53), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 192.168.169.1 (192.168.169.1) 194.115 ms 181.762 ms 77.970 ms
2 96-8-192-3.block0.gvtc.com (96.8.192.3) 94.851 ms 107.971 ms 146.974 ms
3 12.88.219.169 (12.88.219.169) 47.516 ms 218.308 ms 149.762 ms
4 cr1.santx.ip.att.net (12.123.154.10) 81.998 ms 58.617 ms 64.528 ms
5 cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.30.130) 71.363 ms 55.947 ms 70.918 ms
6 gar6.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.100.65) 52.436 ms 58.138 ms 56.583 ms
7 12.90.228.14 (12.90.228.14) 52.971 ms 48.888 ms 80.834 ms
8 border3.tge4-1-bbnet2.ext1.dal.pnap.net (216.52.191.83) 52.188 ms 51.494 ms 52.917 ms
9 te2-1.cer03.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com (216.52.189.30) 55.883 ms 54.237 ms 55.133 ms
10 po3.dar01.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com (66.228.118.209) 53.084 ms 84.979 ms 47.910 ms
11 po1.slr01.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com (66.228.118.138) 66.371 ms 54.266 ms 57.160 ms
I have a feeling that the WiFi conection was flakey, otherwise I would have gotten a better traceroute.
Speed-test-wise I got the following:
I’m guessing the line was provisioned at 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, but I can’t be sure.
The IP address, for what it’s worth, was 96.8.236.103.
All in all, not a bad hotspot, and the traceroute is nice and short between where I was and AT&T’s network in San Antonio, which GVTC appears to use exclusively to connect to the internet nowadays. So someone using an AT&T aircard and GVTC FTTH will find themselves with similar traceroutes within just a few hops, at least around here.
I guess I’ll leave it at that…if I talk any more about GVTC I’ll start getting envious of their 20/3 and 40/10 FTTH service, which I have no chance of getting at my place. Can’t even get DSL there :/