Terrible Vodafone 3G speeds, anyone else?

6digitnumber

I had major issues early this year with my vodafone 3g connection, it got better around February and stayed decent until around the middle of May. Now however, the connection speeds are terrible...Sometimes I get about 500Kbs but usually its closer 200Kbs. Is anyone else having terrible speeds like this? Im in Cork city.....

Also, whatever happened to Vodafone upgrading to 3Mb/s? I suppose if they cant even get 1Mb/s working properly its a long way off?

limerick_woody

I have had vodafone 3g for a few months now and i don't consider it true broadband. I can only gauge the speed on how fast it downloads files - occasionally i get up to 70KB/s but it's usually around the 30KB/s, i don't know how to translate this but i would have expected much better. The speed also varies dramatically during the day. Even web browsing can slow to a crawl at times. Unfortunately i have not broadband alternatives where i live so i am stuck with them. Hopefully i will get more options soon as i would love a better connection.

watty

The 1.8Mbps or 3.6Mbps is not really your user speed, like 2Mbps DSL is mostly 2Mbps. It is the total speed for the sector with a good signal. You would easily have 200Kbps with 5 to 8 users. The main advantage of the 3.6Mbps for the operators the ability to have 24 users simultanously rather than only 12.

Contention of a MOBILE wirless sector that only allows 12 or 24 users is much worse experience than cable / DSL etc that is 48:1 contention on 500 fixed users.

Mobile can't control how many potential users there are in a sector. It could be 50. So DSL will support any contention ratio really they want, wheras the real contention of 3G could be 50:1 but only 12 users can connect...

70KB/s to 30KB/s is a speed roughly of 700Kb/s to 300Kb/s which is fairly decent for 3G/HSDPA.


Contention on FIXED wireless, DSL, Cable is the average of total users bandwidth into total system bandwidth available as a worst case. It's always better as it's averaged over hundreds of users only some of whom are actually using data. Many users simultaneously can get the peak speed of their package.

Contention on Mobile Wireless is usually misleading as it is typically simply the number of users that can connect at once, ignoring all the unconnected potential users in the cell. There is no averaging over large numbers of users of 50MBps to 200Mbps of data. On mobile only one user in a sector can get the full package speed, if no one else is connected.

Mobile Wireless contention can be effectively be 10 times worse than the similar fixed Internet connection.

ablelocks

watty wrote:

The 1.8Mbps or 3.6Mbps is not really your user speed, like 2Mbps DSL is mostly 2Mbps. It is the total speed for the sector with a good signal. You would easily have 200Kbps with 5 to 8 users. The main advantage of the 3.6Mbps for the operators the ability to have 24 users simultanously rather than only 12.

Contention of a MOBILE wirless sector that only allows 12 or 24 users is much worse experience than cable / DSL etc that is 48:1 contention on 500 fixed users.

Mobile can't control how many potential users there are in a sector. It could be 50. So DSL will support any contention ratio really they want, wheras the real contention of 3G could be 50:1 but only 12 users can connect...

70KB/s to 30KB/s is a speed roughly of 700Kb/s to 300Kb/s which is fairly decent for 3G/HSDPA.


Contention on FIXED wireless, DSL, Cable is the average of total users bandwidth into total system bandwidth available as a worst case. It's always better as it's averaged over hundreds of users only some of whom are actually using data. Many users simultaneously can get the peak speed of their package.

Contention on Mobile Wireless is usually misleading as it is typically simply the number of users that can connect at once, ignoring all the unconnected potential users in the cell. There is no averaging over large numbers of users of 50MBps to 200Mbps of data. On mobile only one user in a sector can get the full package speed, if no one else is connected.

Mobile Wireless contention can be effectively be 10 times worse than the similar fixed Internet connection.

watty, if I had known this before I got the 3 "broadband" usb modem it's unlikely I would have kept it after the 14 day trial. I suggest that perhaps a sticky should be put up in this and the mobile/pda forums with this info?

niallb

limerick_woody wrote:

...occasionally i get up to 70KB/s but it's usually around the 30KB/s, i don't know how to translate this but i would have expected much better...

I get a solid download of 7.3kB/s on a 64kb ISDN line.
My non HSDPA 3G connection can reach about 35kB/s on a good day.

70kB/s =~ 600kb
30kB/s =~ 256kb

BadCharlie

Im still on trial with 3g and i get about 20kb/s average. One time it did go at about 100kb/s but that was short lived. I think im going to give my 3g back as most of the time i cant even get connected.

02 singal were i live is alot stronger so i might try that.

watty

ablelocks wrote:

watty, if I had known this before I got the 3 "broadband" usb modem it's unlikely I would have kept it after the 14 day trial. I suggest that perhaps a sticky should be put up in this and the mobile/pda forums with this info?

Ask Asok or Moriarty (PM)?

I'll not go into why I'm not asking them.

git74

I have the vodafone 3G modem, how do i test the signal strenght of the 02 or 3 wireless 3G networks?

Gary

JNive

you can set the modem dialer to select networks manually and do a scan. However it will only tell you what signals it detects, not their strenghts

git74

oh, ok, thanks for that JNive
Gar