3 To Launch 10Gb Cap HSDPA package for €20 a month today

Sponge Bob

Maybe €24.20 including Vat, lets see.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single8393

Three up the ante on their peers who charge €40 a month for 2Gb in some cases. Way to go .

and the Nokia N73 with skype built in will be launched next month. These have been in the UK for a while. No tariffs announced but skype should come out of the 10b allowance. see

http://www.three.co.uk/xseries/get_x_series/index.omp

Hopefully Voda will respond, I have no expectations of O2 .

kaizersoze

It's been on their site for about a week Sponge.



I also says:

** Voice and text services unavailable on Mobile Broadband 10Gb tariff.

No mention of Skype though. Looks like ir includes VAT aswell.

Sponge Bob

thanks Kaiser, did not realise that.

3 have so few customers that the speeds should be quite good

The x series phones are HSDPA phones. The link above shows that data transfer is unlimited with the silver and gold bundles in the UK while certain ports are unlimited in the bronze packages.

kaizersoze

Sponge Bob wrote:

3 have so few customers that the speeds should be quite good

But for how long.
I got a trial of the Voda one last week and it worked great at home but where it was going to be used most had no 3G coverage so it dropped back to 'dialup' speeds. Whats the story with 3's package if there is no 3G coverage? Does it fall back to the GPRS speed (and use Vodas network) or does it stop working completely?

Sponge Bob

It falls back to Voda and at 2g speeds only if on Voda

govinda

Apparently the €19 package is 3 only i.e. the service will not fall back to Vodafone if there is no 3 coverage. For fallback to Vodafone, you'll need the €39.99 tariff.

Sponge Bob

That would explain over treble the allowance at half the price .

I would therefore suspect ( dunno anything specific TBH ) that the x series phones may be 3 only as well.

smellslikeshoes

Hopeing vodafone will respond with a better package. Up to now they have had a bigger cap going for them but now 3 are twice as fast twice the cap and half the price.

lucernarian

govinda wrote:

Apparently the €19 package is 3 only i.e. the service will not fall back to Vodafone if there is no 3 coverage. For fallback to Vodafone, you'll need the €39.99 tariff.

Are you sure about this?? I came across the new offer (kaizerzose, I didn't see the €19 p/m package on the datacard site earlier in the week) this morning and I reccomended it to a friend. If it's limited to 3G then I might reconsider my advice.

Sponge Bob

bye bye Clearwire and Ripwave

thebman

How good is 3's 3G coverage though?

http://www.three.ie/coverage/ireland_zoom4.html

^ That's my region but 3G isn't HSDPA enabled is it? It has to be HSDPA enabled on top of being a 3G region as regular 3G is pretty crappy speeds I think.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. BTW you can get your region with the map by changing the zoom number. Grid is 1 NW, 2 NE, 3 w, 4 e, 5 SW, 6 SE I think.

Dankoozy

whats their uplink speed? is it faster than 384k? too bad i eat up all my 40gb a month limit on eircom and sometimes I upload even more

kaizersoze

To_be_confirmed wrote:

Are you sure about this?? I came across the new offer (kaizerzose, I didn't see the €19 p/m package on the datacard site earlier in the week) this morning and I reccomended it to a friend. If it's limited to 3G then I might reconsider my advice.

I posted in another thread about it on Monday but I think it was Friday it appeared on the site.

Boston

Dankoozy wrote:

whats their uplink speed? is it faster than 384k? too bad i eat up all my 40gb a month limit on eircom and sometimes I upload even more

3G is replacement technology for fixed broadband. Any quoted speeds are group speeds not what an individual can expect.

Irish Wolf

There's plenty of chatter about this on the Mobile & PDA forum...

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=411

Sponge Bob

Yikes, :eek: here's one on their 3 3Gb package .

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055095384

As per my email to 3 customer service on the 19/5/2007, and countless emails and phone calls prior to that. I am returning my obsolete and unused 3 data card.
You have no right to send me a bill in April for over a thousand euro and expect me to pay it. And you are having a laugh if you think I will pay it.
The April bill dates back to usage during the month of March, in March I did not even exceed my quota of 3 gigabytes, let alone rack up a bill of over a thousand euro.
While checking my usage in march with ‘my3’ I noticed the current spending shoot up from a couple of euro to over a thousand euro in a few days I rung up 3 after noticing this but was given no explanation.
3 are just cowboys and cannot even monitor or bill people accordingly. Several of my calls to 3 were futile, and I was hung up on more than once, you are treating me like dog **** so I will treat you the same.
I have made my point over the error in the bill to 3 customer service but you are too ignorant to accept it and apologise.
3 have no idea how to treat customers properly; some stupid guy from billing even suggested I pay half the fee, I mean is he joking. Half the fee, what the f***, it’s like he is saying we are taking the piss but we still would like your money.
3 need to hire more people from 02 and Vodafone so customers can converse properly and have meaningful conversations that are resolved properly.
I am enclosing a cheque for €50, to cover my data card usage for April and May, why should I pay for the month of May when I only used it for 12 days?
I also have included a fee of €61.43 for my talk time 200 bill up to 1st may 2007.
I have used a nokia n73 to connect to the internet since I changed the rubbish v3xx, since then I constantly got disconnected, and the coverage kept changing between 2.5 and 3g, so my over all experience with 3 broadband was rubbish and you have the gall to send me this ridiculous bill.
I want to finish my involvement with 3 immediately and will revert back to Vodafone who know how to run a business and how to send proper bills.

jimmycrackcorm

Strangely enough 3 have taken off the N73 off their list of handsets available to buy... It's a bit mysterious seeing as they also used to advertise x-series coming soon.

Anyway a look at the mobile forum should make people wary of 3.

Offalycool

I was in the carphone warehouse (Galway) today and they just started selling wireless broadband from 3 networks. There are 2 types, one laptop pci plugin card and a usb dongle. The download speed is up to 3.6 Mbs and it costs €19.99 per month for 10 Gb download cap. The catch is we are expected to buy the modem for €129. Don’t know about port blocking but they claim you can’t use VoIP on it so sounds suspect. Here’s the link

http://www.3ireland.ie/handsets_new/datacards_e220.htm

Anybody got this yet?

homah_7ft

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=53346696&postcount=6

Offalycool

Thanks – 300 to 400 kilobytes per sec sounds kind of disappointing.

mickger

Offalycool wrote:

Thanks – 300 to 400 kilobytes per sec sounds kind of disappointing.

I have been getting average speeds of 1400 kilobytes which aint too bad. Been using it when i'm on the move or as a back up when my NTL connection goes down.

watty

There are 4 phone shopes in my local shopping Centre.
Meteor, Vodaphone, O2
and Allegedly Carphone Warehouse.
However no matter what I ask them they offer me something from 3 (also in other Carphone Warehouses). They seem to know little about the products or HSDPA/3G and claim that 3 offers the best service and only 3 offer HSDPA 3Mbps. This is untrue. Vodaphone and O2 also both do HSDPA.

I'd now take anything they say about 3 with a pinch of salt and they are obviously not impartial retailers


Also the fact is all the 3G operators offer a service where the top speed is for one person only in a cell with a good signal. With the Max approx 25 users in a sector you will get 50kbps to 100kbps or even less if many have poorer signal. If more than about 25 people are using it, you may not be able to connect.

So if you are relying on mobile 3G/HSDPA instead of Broadband, you want to discourage neighbours from using it and hope that it is not popular in your area

Nytfevr

This sounds incredible, however, isn't 3.6Mbps 460.8 kilobytes? How on earth are you recieving 1400kbps mickger?? Thats equivalent to 10.94Mbps!! This should really shake up the broadband competition pricing, shame it's only 10gigs tho this is a real viable alternative to DSL

Nytfevr

And why would anyone now get the 3000 package- twice the price for less than a third the data!!! (Aside from slightly subsidised modem)

bk

Nytfevr wrote:

And why would anyone now get the 3000 package- twice the price for less than a third the data!!! (Aside from slightly subsidised modem)

With the more expensive package, if you are in area without 3 coverage, it will use the Vodafone network, I also think it will work abroad. This is not true of the cheaper package.

Sponge Bob

Be very very very careful if using any data package abroad. The roaming charges are often €50 a Mb ...20 megabytes for €1000 ...yes:eek: and are not counted in your allowance .

Then again they may even cost nothing . Email customer service before you go to confirm the situation with your own package in writing .

As the 10gb one is a 3 network only package its most likely the safest to bring abroad but may only work in about 3 countries, uk italy australia for example.

koloughlin

Nytfevr wrote:

This sounds incredible, however, isn't 3.6Mbps 460.8 kilobytes? How on earth are you recieving 1400kbps mickger?? Thats equivalent to 10.94Mbps!! This should really shake up the broadband competition pricing, shame it's only 10gigs tho this is a real viable alternative to DSL

I think for networking kbps is kilobits per second not kilobytes per second, and a kilobit in networking is 1000 bits not 1024 bits, so his 1400 kbps is really the same as 1.4Mbps

mickger

Nytfevr wrote:

This sounds incredible, however, isn't 3.6Mbps 460.8 kilobytes? How on earth are you recieving 1400kbps mickger?? Thats equivalent to 10.94Mbps!! This should really shake up the broadband competition pricing, shame it's only 10gigs tho this is a real viable alternative to DSL

Always get confused with bites and bytes and that stuff. I'm getting 1.5 megs not 10megs lol

Boston

koloughlin wrote:

I think for networking kbps is kilobits per second not kilobytes per second, and a kilobit in networking is 1000 bits not 1024 bits, so his 1400 kbps is really the same as 1.4Mbps

A Kb is 1024 bits and KB is 1024 Bytes. 8 bits in a Byte. There is some weird system where they try to decimalise these things purely as a marketing ploy. When you talking about anything at a technical level it's always powers of 2, and anything to do with communications systems will use binary Digits at it is the standard unit developed by Shannon and Heartly.

As for the rest, what watty said. Contention isn't something new. I'm amazed at how many people seemed shocked and appalled by the poor data rates. I'm also amazed at anyone who things any service with a 10 gig cap can be a viable broadband replacement.

watty

Or even the Mobile data services sold with 10Mbyte caps!

<<Pedant mode>>
Strictly speaking 1024 = 1k and 1024 x 1024 = 1M is wrong, k = 1000 (kilo) and M =1,000,000 (Mega).

George Boole in 1840s/1850s developed Boolean Alegebra based on counting in 1s and 0s instead of up to 9. Nothing to do with Shannon really (Communication theory 1948).

Memory chips are addressed by binary coded address wires. This means memory chips (unlike hard drives) can only have powers of two storage, 10 bits address = 1024 locations.

Hard drives have a certain storage per track which is dependent on modulation, head gap, recording mode etc. This has no intrinsic "power of two" like memory addressing. Then you have an arbitrary number of tracks decided by platter radius and head width (Floppy disk and stereo cassette tape have similar size tracks just under 0.5mm, original tapes & drums used 6mm tracks). Then you have an arbitrary number of platters / heads (not what is Bios, that is fictional) depending on physical thickness of platters, head /arm height and package height.

Thus Hard Disk drives are measured in true decimal K & M, not the "computer memory industry" approximate k & M of 1024 instead of 1000

Different utilities in OS may use Binary "fake k" of 1024 or "true k" of 1000 in calculating and displaying storage.

<</Pedant mode>>

Additionally when doing downloads your "connection speed" may be a raw kbps (bits) figure including any protocol / signalling or error correction overhead. The kBps (Bytes) figure is actual bytes getting written to disk. The server may be doing "on the fly compression", this will have no effect on MP3 or DIVX or ZIP, but on uncompressed programes, databases or text files you can get on average 2:1 compression, or even more so your data link can seem twice or three times faster than it really is. Normally the speed of bytes transferred is closer to 10:1 than the real physical 8:1 Bit to Byte ratio.

dlofnep

Does anyone know of a coverage penetration map for the 3g networks?

pm.

do ya think it would be good for online gaming ?

Caterpillar

smellslikeshoes wrote:

Hopeing vodafone will respond with a better package. Up to now they have had a bigger cap going for them but now 3 are twice as fast twice the cap and half the price.

Better be a bit careful here folks....

Vodafone have a cap of 5GB (5 Gigabytes)
Three have a cap of 10Gb (Gigabits)

Unless I'm mistaken, this means that Vodafone are offering a cap 4 times greater than Three are offering.

(5GB = 40Gb)
(10Gb = 1.25GB)

clearz

dlofnep wrote:

Does anyone know of a coverage penetration map for the 3g networks?

http://www.three.ie/coverage/index.htm

Click on an area of the map to view the 3G coverage for it. Dosen't accually seem too bad at the moment. They claim to have 80% population coverage which aint too bad. I dream of the day when I can work from beside a lake on a laptop with my fishing rod cast out. Might be closer than I thought .

grey wolf

I,m in central Dublin and got 3s USB card last week-useless indoors-will be returning it for a refund.

smellslikeshoes

Caterpillar wrote:

Better be a bit careful here folks....

Vodafone have a cap of 5GB (5 Gigabytes)
Three have a cap of 10Gb (Gigabits)

Unless I'm mistaken, this means that Vodafone are offering a cap 4 times greater than Three are offering.

(5GB = 40Gb)
(10Gb = 1.25GB)

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

Snaga

Just to expand on Watty's post above...

In telecomms (for use in bitrate measurements) a kilobit is quite literally - 1000 bits. Its a decimal measurement 10 to the power of 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiloBit

A kibibit (KIloBInaryBIT) is the correct term for 1024 bits - based on the binary measurement - this is 2 to the power of 10 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibit

The binary format is used for storage devices, while the decimal format should be used to describe bit rates like in this thread!

Boston

watty wrote:

Or even the Mobile data services sold with 10Mbyte caps!

<<Pedant mode>>
Strictly speaking 1024 = 1k and 1024 x 1024 = 1M is wrong, k = 1000 (kilo) and M =1,000,000 (Mega).

George Boole in 1840s/1850s developed Boolean Alegebra based on counting in 1s and 0s instead of up to 9. Nothing to do with Shannon really (Communication theory 1948).

Memory chips are addressed by binary coded address wires. This means memory chips (unlike hard drives) can only have powers of two storage, 10 bits address = 1024 locations.

Hard drives have a certain storage per track which is dependent on modulation, head gap, recording mode etc. This has no intrinsic "power of two" like memory addressing. Then you have an arbitrary number of tracks decided by platter radius and head width (Floppy disk and stereo cassette tape have similar size tracks just under 0.5mm, original tapes & drums used 6mm tracks). Then you have an arbitrary number of platters / heads (not what is Bios, that is fictional) depending on physical thickness of platters, head /arm height and package height.

Thus Hard Disk drives are measured in true decimal K & M, not the "computer memory industry" approximate k & M of 1024 instead of 1000

Different utilities in OS may use Binary "fake k" of 1024 or "true k" of 1000 in calculating and displaying storage.

<</Pedant mode>>

At an operating system level though you talk about disk space in terms of pages to the power of 2, which are themselves storage locations those size is equal to 2 to some power. Disk I/O also works in a binary fashion. So while the disk themselves might not be bounded to binary values, the data they hold is ultimately translated into that format.

Additionally when doing downloads your "connection speed" may be a raw kbps (bits) figure including any protocol / signalling or error correction overhead. The kBps (Bytes) figure is actual bytes getting written to disk. The server may be doing "on the fly compression", this will have no effect on MP3 or DIVX or ZIP, but on uncompressed programes, databases or text files you can get on average 2:1 compression, or even more so your data link can seem twice or three times faster than it really is. Normally the speed of bytes transferred is closer to 10:1 than the real physical 8:1 Bit to Byte ratio.

In that case it not be something like 10 bits to every byte by the time you strip away start/stop bits, framing bits, headers, and pre/post-ambles?

The binary format is used for storage devices, while the decimal format should be used to describe bit rates like in this thread!

Other way around no?

smellslikeshoes

pm. wrote:

do ya think it would be good for online gaming ?

No not good for gaming. Expect pings of 150ms+, Might be suitable for some strategy games and maybe for some mmorpgs but useless for anything else.

Snaga

Boston wrote:

Other way around no?

Erm - did you read the provided links or just snap-reply?

Boston

Snaga wrote:

Erm - did you read the provided links or just snap-reply?

I did and I accept it. Not because you linked to Wiki though, but because I just spent the last two weeks studying for a digital communications exam and I know that Capacity(bit rate) is directly related to bandwidth, which can take any real value.

I did however read your post as contradicting watty where you say "binary format is used for storage devices". He posts outlines the arguement for decimal format.

Snaga

Ah I see the confusion from my post - mea culpa on a not being specific enough. (I was not providing a counter to Watty's post).

To clarify-

Information stored on a digital device are measured in a binary format - this covers computer memory chips and any other chip based storage (e.g. flash drives) .

The manufacturers of Hard Disks market the devices using the decimal format - but your pc will still measure it in the correct binary format as it is a storage device.

In Telecomms - the decimal format is always used when talking about bit rates.

Caterpillar

smellslikeshoes wrote:

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

So, is the 3.6Mbps 3.6 Megabits/s or 3.6 MegaBytes/s?

I thought upper case 'B' = Bytes, lower case 'B' = bits???

Just curious how you can be so definite.

Xcellor

smellslikeshoes wrote:

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

From what 3 told me when i phoned it was gigabytes not bits. That would make sense since they measure what you go over by in MB not Mb. Also if it was megabits that would mean the other package would be 3000 megabits (375 megabytes!!). Also all the other providers deal with MB/GB so it wouldn't make much sense for 3 to go in a different direction.

That's just my opinion anyways,

ballooba

So is this €40 per month total?

i.e. basic package plus broadband.

Or can you get this on it's own?

smellslikeshoes

Xcellor wrote:

From what 3 told me when i phoned it was gigabytes not bits. That would make sense since they measure what you go over by in MB not Mb. Also if it was megabits that would mean the other package would be 3000 megabits (375 megabytes!!). Also all the other providers deal with MB/GB so it wouldn't make much sense for 3 to go in a different direction.

That's just my opinion anyways,

Your reading into things to much. 3 have 10Gigabyte limit and voda have 5 gigabyte limit.

Dankoozy

Caterpillar wrote:

So, is the 3.6Mbps 3.6 Megabits/s or 3.6 MegaBytes/s?

I thought upper case 'B' = Bytes, lower case 'B' = bits???

Just curious how you can be so definite.

its 3.6 megabit. i think 576kbit upstream, the broadband finder site lists it at 384. of course these speeds assume you are standing beside an empty HSDPA base at 6am on a sunday morning with no interference

Boston

Actually it just occurred to me that WCDMA uses Qpsk or Qam (not to sure about this one) so the modulation is in powers of two so shouldn't the data rate also be some power of two? Like the may a T1 line has 1.544MBits/ps because the modulation is 8 bit PCM. Also when they talk about Chips in white papers I persume that when they are using the power of 2 format.

watty

Speeds are always in "bits" because traditionally communication was serial data, one bit at a time. Since bits & Bytes used b=bit, B=byte.

Cap = Storage, which has always been in Bytes, as storage addressing is traditionally measured in Bytes (Word sizes on address busses are another story). G can mean 1000x1000x1000 or 1024x1024x1024. Traditionally with computers Disk capacity is measured in x1000 increments and Memory in x1024 increments for good physical reasons.

I'd say ISPs mean GigaBytes for CAP where G=1024x1024x1024, but they would be perfectly correct to use 1000x1000x1000 measurement as Technically Giga = 1000,000,000 and 1024x1024x1024 is Gibi.

Quote 1,073,741,824 = 1024x1024x1024 = 2^30
The IEC recommends that this unit should instead be called a gibibyte (abbreviated GiB) not Gigabyte as Giga is defined by SI as 1,000,000,000 = 10^9


If it turns out that "3" are advertising a cap in "bits" not "Bytes" they need hauled up be advertising standards people as that would be extremely misleading an unethical advertising. We need decent consumer rights groups in this Country.

http://www.three.ie/handsets_new/datacards_e220.htm

Definitely shows b rather than B. So the page either has a typo (four times?) or they are weasels.

Snaga

We are fundamentally talking about measurement standards here.

This debate grew out of people measuring bit rates.

Lets take a physical circuit that can push 1024 bits per second. How do we measure that?

Do we measure it as 1kilobit per second just because the circuit uses a base 2 encoding scheme?

No we dont - we use the acceptable measurment unit as agreed by the industry.

So - as one kilobit per second is 1000 bits per second - this circuit has a maximum bit rate of 1.024 kilobits per second (or 1Kibibit per second!).

The bit rate of the circuit doesn't change.

Boston

Snaga wrote:

We are fundamentally talking about measurement standards here.

This debate grew out of people measuring bit rates.

Lets take a physical circuit that can push 1024 bits per second. How do we measure that?

Do we measure it as 1kilobit per second just because the circuit uses a base 2 encoding scheme?

No we dont - we use the acceptable measurment unit as agreed by the industry.

So - as one kilobit per second is 1000 bits per second - this circuit has a maximum bit rate of 1.024 kilobits per second (or 1Kibibit per second!).

The bit rate of the circuit doesn't change.

Yes but what is the 3.6Mbs quoted in Megi ormebibit, I've looked at some white papers and they don't say/