T-Mobile 7.2 Mbps HSPA Testing in my Backyard
Living near Philadelphia, I often miss out on the newest tech happenings in places like San Francisco. But I’ve bided my time and now I finally get to try out new tech before Silicon Valley. T-Mobile is in the process of upgrading their 3G network to offer 7.2 Mbps HSPA speeds and they asked me if I wanted to take it for a test drive. To say that my reaction time was faster than the latency of my home FiOS connection would be an understatement– absolutely, I said! I just received their webConnect USB adapter (shown below), so on my next out-and-about work session, I’ll be driving from the farms to the city to give this a run though.
My expectation is to use the connection for my typical work habits of browsing the web, responding to email and creating content. But I know that 3G customers do far more than that, so I’ll watch some streaming video, move some large files around and get a general feel for the bandwidth and latency of the connection. I realize that our readers outside of the U.S. are probably wondering what the big deal is — after all, some of them have had wireless connections of 7.2 Mbps or faster for some time now. Putting this in perspective for you folks — no U.S. carrier is offering theoretical speeds faster than 3.6 Mbps at the moment. Exciting for us… you, not so much. 
T-Mobile is working on the network upgrades now on a nationwide basis and currently offers 170 million POPs for 3G access. The expectation is that the 7.2 Mbps upgrade will be readily available by the end of this year. Why the rush? T-Mo is already planning to move towards HSPA+ with theoretical speeds of 21 Mbps in 2010, which is far more aggressive that AT&T’s known plans and competes well with Verizon’s move towards LTE next year. The best part of the current T-Mobile upgrade is that most of the devices they’ve launched in 2009 are already capable of using the faster 7.2 Mpbs network. Based on a call I had with the company, devices like the Cliq, MyTouch, Touch Pro 2, Dash 3G and even the year-old G1 should enjoy faster speeds once the network upgrades are competed.
I’ll have an update on my experience with the tests and will try to get some video of the experience. Since I have a Verizon 3G adapter, I’ll see if can get a side-by-side comparsion too.
be sure to bang things like sustained upload speeds and download speeds. I am out in the field a lot and upload literally GIGS of high megapixel photos to a shared store for others to get access to. I really want a faster sustained upload and download speed for this.
So lets do the calculation, shall we? (So few blogs do this …)
If you carrier TOS states the typical 5GB/month data cap, 7.2Mbps translates to 94.8 minutes of download a month (assuming you could actually obtain that rate for a sustained period of time which is very unlikely.)
The point is while peak transfer rate is important (definitely good for advertising), the actual amount of data a carrier will allow you download or upload in a given time frame and the cost is probably more important to most users most of the time.
4g type services are not posting CAPS, so they could in effect be not limited.
A city-wide 4G WiMax based service hasn’t hit my town yet, so I can’t comment on what a TOS might contain or what the eventual cost may be. Of course, 4G isn’t what we’re talking about here.
The issue for carriers is that HSPA is applied to the existing cell tower network, so while an individual under idea circumstances might enjoy improved transfer speeds, the overall capacity of the network remains the same. We’re already familiar with 3G congestion in crowded urban areas where those using existing 3G technology rarely get the advertised rates. HSPA will not improve the situation.
The carriers response for too much demand for a scarce resource has been primarily to reduce demand. Caps are one aspect of that.
So why a rush to HSPA? Well the higher speeds do look better in commercials and print…