Mine has been a mobile-only household for more than 6 months now and I'm rather reliant on it, which made it very interesting for me to see that according to my "Connection Information" on the modem client, my 3 mobile broadband service is now giving me a maximum 2MBit/s uplink and 8.6Mbit/s downlink. Of course the average speed crawls along at sub-50Kbit/s most of the time but previously the highest download speed was 3.6Mbit/s. A higher maximum would indicate some sort of network upgrade. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting to see what maximum I get, but after 15 mins all I've had is (a par-for-the-course) 86Kbit/s uplink and 147Kbit/s downlink, during which time I've been downloading emails, browsing and uploading pictures to blogger. So the poor general performance of my mobile broadband prohibits me from double checking the results I received before. I'll investigate further.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
Has 3 upgraded its network in London?
Mine has been a mobile-only household for more than 6 months now and I'm rather reliant on it, which made it very interesting for me to see that according to my "Connection Information" on the modem client, my 3 mobile broadband service is now giving me a maximum 2MBit/s uplink and 8.6Mbit/s downlink. Of course the average speed crawls along at sub-50Kbit/s most of the time but previously the highest download speed was 3.6Mbit/s. A higher maximum would indicate some sort of network upgrade. I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting to see what maximum I get, but after 15 mins all I've had is (a par-for-the-course) 86Kbit/s uplink and 147Kbit/s downlink, during which time I've been downloading emails, browsing and uploading pictures to blogger. So the poor general performance of my mobile broadband prohibits me from double checking the results I received before. I'll investigate further.
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What sort of device do you have? 8.6 Mbps suggests 15 codes or 64QAM device which would be a surprise.
ReplyDeleteI've never known 3 give better than 50 kbps on the uplink.
ReplyDeleteThe three web site
ReplyDeletehttp://www.three.co.uk/Mobile_Broadband/Coverage_and_speed
claims that 'Phase 1' of the upgrade to 7.2 Mbps is now complete. (Watch the map which has over the top 'HSDPA coverage rollout'.
Needless to say, Phase 1 is basically London and bits of other conurbations.
It's a Huawei E169G. Shouldn't be capable of more than 7.2 Mbit/s d/l. But I've always suspected that when the service died (which it does regularly) it artificially flashed up the max available network speed. It's done that regularly, even though I've never received anywhere near that speed. I think this must be what's happening here. So I couldn't have got the higher rate anyway, but network upgrades (if that's what's happened) are always interesting to see.
ReplyDelete