3G iPhone vs EDGE iPhone Speed Comparison

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

Applicando published (http://www.applicando.com/01NET/HP/0,1254,36_ART_88480,00.html?lw=36;3) an interesting speed comparison video comparing the iPhone's EDGE download speeds and a mimicked 3G iPhone.

In the comparison video two iPhones load the same web page side-by-side. The 3G iPhone is demonstrated using a Wifi connection sharing the internet connection of an iMac which was connected to the internet via HSDPA (Huawei E172 HSPDA modem).

Video Link (http://www.applicando.com/01NET/HP/0,1254,36_ART_88480,00.html?lw=36;3)

In the end the "3G iPhone" downloads the page almost twice as fast.




Article Link (http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2008/05/01/3g-iphone-vs-edge-iphone-speed-comparison/)

[danielsan26]

Probably not an entirely fair comparison, since the iphone is sharing the imac's 3G connection, it means the imac was probably connected to the 3G network already, whereas the 2.5G iphone had to join the data network then load the page.

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

[macduke]

Probably not an entirely fair comparison, since the iphone is sharing the imac's 3G connection, it means the imac was probably connected to the 3G network already, whereas the 2.5G iphone had to join the data network then load the page.

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

Not necessarily. The iMac has the ability to render pages much quicker than the iPhone. There were a lot of images and ads to place in that page. I doubt it would be entirely possible to come up with an accurate result anyway. Depending on signal strength, what city they are in, what type of chip ends up in the 3g iPhone, the processing power of the 3g iPhone, and the physical distance to the server the webpage was stored on can all be factors. For instance, when I'm at home in the east side of Kansas City, my Edge speeds seem to be fairly good. When I go over to the west side of KC where my girlfriend lives, the Edge speeds are easily 50% faster. When I'm at school in Springfield, MO, the speeds are about 25-50% slower then my base speeds on the east side of KC. Given the variations in the same technology, and all the various 3g chips and specs, cell phone tower quality and density, and the web pages you typically visit, everyone will have a different experience. We won't really be able to tell until we get a baseline score from thousands of people using the final version, but its still kinda neat to see what we can look forward to, even though my college town doesn't have 3g. I just wish the new iPhone is compatible with my school's wifi network. Then I won't ever have to worry about 3g! And the annoying connect to wifi popups will go away since there is coverage everywhere.

[craigverse]

Time will tell.

[DB2k]

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

If the 3G iPhone doesn't have an always on PDP context then that will truely be ****.

[boeingair]

The iMac has the ability to render pages much quicker than the iPhone.

This is completely irrelevant. The iMac just serves as a conduit to connect the iPhone to the 3G network and is not rendering or processing the data that is coming down in any way.

[bmb012]

The biggest problem I have with EDGE is that it takes so long for it to make a connection. Checking my email takes much longer on EDGE than WiFi, but loading a page, once it starts loading, isn't all that much slower...

[Dagless]

Anything that shaves time off loading is fine by me. Hurry up 3G.

[MarkW19]

I think Apple should also work on increasing the iPhone's rendering speed of webpages - on wifi, with my MacBook and iPhone next to eachother on my wifi network, my MacBook is so much faster than my iPhone generally, even on just simple mainly-text sites.

As well as just shifting to newer/different technologies/network types, they should really concentrate on the speed of the device itself.

This relates to other apps for me as well - I really wish the whole thing was a lot snappier and more instant, without the little delays all over the place (SMS, Calendar, Safari etc.)...

[ventro]

Well with the rumors of Apple to switching to the brand new ARM processor floating about, maybe they are killing two birds with the 3G iphone.

[Willis]

*starts chant*

3G iPhone, 3G iPhone, 3G iPhone :D

My sister has an iPhone now and yes, its nice, great, does what we want... but I'd prefer 3G.. more coverage in the UK =)

[big_malk]

I'm sure when the iPhone came out there were comparison videos showing how the EDGE iPhone wasn't much slower than 3G Phones were, now we have videos show it's a lot slower.... Funny how this easily changes to suit :p

[MikeDTyke]

I'm sure when the iPhone came out there were comparison videos showing how the EDGE iPhone wasn't much slower than 3G Phones were, now we have videos show it's a lot slower.... Funny how this easily changes to suit :p

That comparison was showing an Edge iPhone v a 3G N95. What it was proving was that even with a faster connection the current 3G phones were so slow in rendering it to make overall speed almost the same.

This is showing that a 3G iPhone, with some mitigating factors should be at least twice as fast as the old Edge phone.

RTFA.

[Laglorden]

Well, Edge is 384 kbit, "Turbo"-3G is 7,2 Mbit here i Sweden, soon 14,4 I imagine it's the same in most of the world?

So, It's like the difference between usb1 and usb2 or something... Huge difference, maybe not when rendering web-pages, but download your entire music-collection or something, or try streming highish-quality video from your home-server to your phone.

(I don't understand why people think they need lots of GB of memory on their phones, let the content stay at home and just access it from anywhere)

[elppa]

I think Apple should also work on increasing the iPhone's rendering speed of webpages - on wifi, with my MacBook and iPhone next to eachother on my wifi network, my MacBook is so much faster than my iPhone generally, even on just simple mainly-text sites.

As well as just shifting to newer/different technologies/network types, they should really concentrate on the speed of the device itself.

This relates to other apps for me as well - I really wish the whole thing was a lot snappier and more instant, without the little delays all over the place (SMS, Calendar, Safari etc.)...

With the greatest respect, I don't think you really understand the technology that well.

Comparing the iPhone with a laptop is just simply not fair.

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip) and the software is well optimised — don't forget it also has pretty much the full OS X software stack bar the GUI. The ARM CPU will not rival an Intel Core 2.

I have used a touch and found the fluidity and responsiveness a major plus.

[batchtaster]

Well, Edge is 384 kbit, "Turbo"-3G is 7,2 Mbit here i Sweden, soon 14,4 I imagine it's the same in most of the world?

Um, yeah. My wired broadband is 512kbit/sec. Ain't no way the wireless 3G speeds are gonna even approach that. Australia's telecommunications infrastructure totally sucks dead rats.

The government is talking nation-wide upgrade to 12Mbit... but in, like, 5 years. By which point it will still be a joke thanks to advances in other countries like Sweden.

(Meanwhile, instead of doing the sensible thing and making parents responsible for their childrens' internet usage, they plan to lock the country down like China. I mean literally - they are using China as the template for Australia's internet censorship laws. Tech-wise, this country is total arse.)

[MarkW19]

With the greatest respect, I don't think you really understand the technology that well.

Comparing the iPhone with a laptop is just simply not fair.

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip) and the software is well optimised — don't forget it also has pretty much the full OS X software stack bar the GUI. The ARM CPU will not rival an Intel Core 2.

I have used a touch and found the fluidity and responsiveness a major plus.

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

My point is - for me, I use my iPhone on wifi a lot more than GSM, and it is the PHONE that is the bottleneck in terms of speed, not my connection speed.

If the phone itself was better optimised and less laggy, the whole web browsing experience would be much quicker and more usable, regardless of whether it's on a "2.5" or "3G" network.

On another note - indeed, having a ~600MHz processor inside it should mean it absolutely flies. Who needs a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo just to display a text-based website (or indeed, a ~600MHz one)?! My old Windows-based phones (HTC etc.) were MUCH snappier with Calendar, Contacts, SMS etc. My iPhone has delays all over the place, it's not just websites for me.

Don't get me wrong - I love my iPhone, but it certainly isn't perfect. And I find it takes me a lot longer to do certain things that I do daily and constantly (mainly Calendar, SMS) than it has done on other devices.

[Shadowriver]

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip)

Yes it has Samsung ARM11 620MHz but its underclocked to 412MHz, and speed its software controled ^^ so we didn't see max power of iPhone (and iPod Touch) yet

[elppa]

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

Re-reading my post, I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending, it was never my intention, I just got a bit side-tracked by the comparison of a Laptop chip with a mobile chip.

No doubt Apple will continue to optimise iPhone OS. There's always a trade off between software sophistication and hardware requirements.

Windows Mobile (being licensed) has to perform on the “lowest common denominator” handsets, so no doubt has lighter hardware requirements.

Making there own hardware, Apple has a bit more flexibility in this area, but from the sounds of things could have optimised some areas better. There is no reason why SMS should lag, that is silly.

Obviously SMS is not something I got to try on the touch.

[revenantananias]

For what it is worth, my roommate had a blackjack on 3g, and my iPhone on the edge network loaded the BBC Frontpage faster. We live just north of Philly, and both had full bars. And my iPhone loaded the whole page, his blackjack loaded some crappy version.

I am content with the edge network, it takes less then 15 seconds to load macrumors website. But then again, I grew up with dial-up.

[rapiscan]

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.


Mark,

I say this with the same respect as the other poster, I don't think you understand the underlying technology required to process a webpage. It isn't as simple as streaming bits that represent text. The biggest bottle neck to TCP/IP traffic has always been the processor due to the huge amount of overhead it takes to process packets. This is especially the case when you have dropped packets and out of order packets (which are prevalent on this type of network). What's happening in the background to get that data to your screen is very complex.

To learn more about TCP/IP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP

[Dagless]

For what it is worth, my roommate had a blackjack on 3g, and my iPhone on the edge network loaded the BBC Frontpage faster. We live just north of Philly, and both had full bars. And my iPhone loaded the whole page, his blackjack loaded some crappy version.

I am content with the edge network, it takes less then 15 seconds to load macrumors website. But then again, I grew up with dial-up.

Rendering speed also comes into play. The iPhone has a very fast renderer compared to a lot of phones.

[bstpierre]

My iPhone has delays all over the place, it's not just websites for me.

What I don't get is the long delay when starting up the Calculator. It comes up and then a second (or so) later the number shows up in the display and you can start using it. Why is that so slow?

[TheSpecialist]

The reason why the 3G Nokia N95 was slower then the 2.5 EDGE iPhone is because iPhone uses the real Safari, which renders much better then a the 'baby internet' of the N95.

[MarkW19]

Re-reading my post, I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending, it was never my intention, I just got a bit side-tracked by the comparison of a Laptop chip with a mobile chip.

No probs, and yes, it looks like it could certainly do with more optimising. But it's a first generation device, and is fantastic. It just needs some tweaking :) With the MS Exchange/Enterprise stuff soon coming, I think Apple will really need to speed the thing up - I can't imagine business users liking having to wait for the calendar/calculator to come up or register their input, etc. They're used to it being a lot more instant, even on their crappy Windows-based devices.

Mark,

I say this with the same respect as the other poster, I don't think you understand the underlying technology required to process a webpage. It isn't as simple as streaming bits that represent text. The biggest bottle neck to TCP/IP traffic has always been the processor due to the huge amount of overhead it takes to process packets. This is especially the case when you have dropped packets and out of order packets (which are prevalent on this type of network). What's happening in the background to get that data to your screen is very complex.

To learn more about TCP/IP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP

My complaints aren't just about Safari - they're about the whole device, which is full of delays when trying to do only very simple things (open an SMS, open calendar, add a calendar appointment, open the calculator - all things I could do instantly on my old Windows Mobile devices), as well as Safari.

To be honest, I'm not too bothered about the underlying technology, as most users aren't/won't be. All I know is that Apple has said this is "Mac OS X in your pocket", which it is, but if it compromises too much on basic things like speed, there's really got to be room for improvement to live up to that claim. A ~600MHz processor - in a device that Apple clearly wants in everyone's pockets, to also be used by BUSINESS users where speed and efficiency is the key, and time is money - has got to be capable of displaying a simple webpage quicker than it is now, which is currently much slower than even a modest/low-spec laptop PC/Mac. Even if I'm sitting in the garden with my iPhone in my hand, I tend to go into my house, up the stairs to the other side of the house, and turn on my Mac, just to do simple web browsing as it is so much faster. This is Apple - I have faith they'll improve on it.

What I don't get is the long delay when starting up the Calculator. It comes up and then a second (or so) later the number shows up in the display and you can start using it. Why is that so slow?

Yep, I get the same delay with most things - SMS, Calendar, and more.

Anyway, sorry for hi-jacking the thread!

[meerkats]

We'll likely see enhancements in the software as well. The latest version of safari is much quick than the previous one.

Best,

D

[Buschmaster]

It still took 16 seconds to load a page?

Hm.

3G impresses me less and less. If the next iPhone simply has 3G and GPS as the only additional things, I won't think about upgrading. 3G isn't anywhere in my area anyway!

But I am surrounded by wifi...

[QCassidy352]

I question their methodology. But assuming it accurately represents 3G speeds, I'm a bit disappointed. It's faster, but still not all that fast.

[blindzero]

It still took 16 seconds to load a page?

Hm.

3G impresses me less and less. If the next iPhone simply has 3G and GPS as the only additional things, I won't think about upgrading. 3G isn't anywhere in my area anyway!

But I am surrounded by wifi...

Yeah...the way 3G people were beating up Apple for choosing Edge, I thought 3G was like the second coming. So it appears it might be twice as fast (at least on that guys street hehe). I'm glad something is coming along faster and all, but I'm a bit disappointed. Certainly not "Broadband" speeds at least in the U.S...

Although I'm sure you do it- Fully shutting down and Restarting the IPhone from time to time does help with some of the speed issues that occassionally pop up (just like restarting a computer).

[stagi]

looks pretty nice, there might be too many good new options for me to resist upgrading :)

[mark34]

Yikes, that Edge browsing is slooooooow. I would not even bother. this is why I held off on the iPhone as hard as it was to do. Cannot wait for 3G.

I don't know exact speeds, but I use a 3G card on AT&T with my MacBook Air. It is very fast. I can browse, use Slingbox, YouTube, all without feeling slow at all. It is not as quick as my cable modem at home of course, but it is faster than many WiFi connections I find in public and at my office.

Put simply, 3G on my laptop is an excellent experience, and I am hopeful that the 3G iPhone will prove the same.

And, did I mention that Edge is painful for anything other than email or some other push type data?

[psxndc]

Ummmm, so this is one test of one page? How about a little scientific rigor here. Let's have time lapse videos of the same page rendered 10 times. Or get the average load of 10 different pages.

I won $10 on the lottery once, but that doesn't mean I'm going to win $10 every time I play.

[nixtacy8]

It seems to me the only true way to figure speed comparisons is to have a 3G iPhone. So Steve, for all of our sakes, please just release it soon, so we all can do some real-world comparisons!

[benspratling]

That's it? Only 2x faster? Maybe it's not worth the wait. Or only worth half the wait... :)

[benspratling]

Ummmm, so this is one test of one page? How about a little scientific rigor here. Let's have time lapse videos of the same page rendered 10 times. Or get the average load of 10 different pages.

I won $10 on the lottery once, but that doesn't mean I'm going to win $10 every time I play.

Yes, and computers work just like the lottery - you never know what you're going to get, that's why we use them for important scientific calculations.

Man the sarcasm is coming easy this morning...

[winterspan]

First of all, this isn't a fair comparison in the least. There are so many variables in this process it's impossible to draw any conclusions.

1) Disregarding the iMac workaround for a second, as others mentioned, the actual throughput and latency of a 3G UMTS/HSPA connection depends on a huge number of factors, including cell-tower total bandwidth available, user saturation, distance from tower, tower transmit power, obstructions, etc.

2) 3G PCMCIA/expresscard laptop cards most always see a higher throughput than 3G cellphones, all else being the same. I'm not sure if the cause of this has to do with the 3G chipset used, the processing power of the host CPU, the total output power of the radio, or what else. So using a HSDPA iMac card isn't real fair.

3) the round-about mechanism of HSDPA express card-> PCIe bus -> software driver -> iMac-> software driver -> IMac Wifi radio -> iPhone WiFi radio -> software driver -> Safari has many places that could be possible bottlenecks for throughput, and even more importantly many places for added latency.

On a related note, one thing for everyone to remember is that 3G technology, including HSDPA (fast download) and HSUPA (fast upload), does not only improve average throughput by 3-10X, but just as importantly it *GREATLY* improves latency of the TCP/IP connection. So (without HTTP pipelining) when you load an average webpage on the iPhone (just like on a computer), mobile safari has to issue an individual HTTP request for every single element on the page including javascript files, CSS files, images, icons, etc and in SEQUENTIAL ORDER, waiting for each chunk of data to return before issuing the new request.
The result of this process is that data throughput is NOT the only factor affecting the loading of webpages. The latency on both the uplink (from phone to web server) and downlink (web server to phone) side of the connection can have a profound impact on how long a page takes to load. EDGE not only has a much slower data rate than HSDPA, but it also has a much higher latency. I believe it's in the 500-900ms range, and HSDPA improves this to 100-200ms. Conversely, HSUPA has the same affect on the uplink side of the connection. So although latency will not really improve raw file transfer times, it will have a significant effect on web page loading times. (NOTE that I specifically referred to HSDPA/HSUPA when talking about improved connection latency over EDGE. I did not mentioned the base 3G technology UMTS --- apparently UMTS by itself doesn't improve latency that much over EDGE)

[EagerDragon]

Not sure about the value of comparing a make believe 3G iPhone to a real Edge iPhone.
There are too many variables, this makes no sense.

But what makes even less sense, is the fight in these pages over something that has little to do with reality.

Which one will be faster .... The grey elephant or the pink elephant?

Ummmm, so this is one test of one page? How about a little scientific rigor here. Let's have time lapse videos of the same page rendered 10 times. Or get the average load of 10 different pages.

I won $10 on the lottery once, but that doesn't mean I'm going to win $10 every time I play.

That's it? Only 2x faster? Maybe it's not worth the wait. Or only worth half the wait... :)

The test is meaningless guys.

[j763]

So will the new iPhone have both 3G & EDGE support? What happens if you're in an area that is covered by EDGE, but not 3G?

[EagerDragon]

So will the new iPhone have both 3G & EDGE support? What happens if you're in an area that is covered by EDGE, but not 3G?

3G chip is backward compatible, will use Edge if 3G not available.
Both (old and new) phones also can live in the same network.

[dstrauss]

Well, Edge is 384 kbit, "Turbo"-3G is 7,2 Mbit here i Sweden, soon 14,4 I imagine it's the same in most of the world?...


I'd KILL for 384 kbs Edge; at best, in San Antonio (home of AT&T cellular) you get 140-150 kbs tops. And from what I experienced in the same location on an AT&T Tilt 3g topped out at 750kbs

[NewSc2]

To be fair, they should have tethered an iPhone wifi to an iMac with an EDGE card.

[sparkleytone]

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

There simply is no comparison. Either you realize this or you don't understand the technology. A 1-3% tick on your laptop while resolving, connecting, downloading, and rendering a page on your laptop is a highly intensive operation on a mobile device regardless of the actual content.

As far as the video goes, I have similar experience that makes me excited for 3G. One of my bandmates has a WM phone with WMWifiRouter on it, and the difference in speed is very noticeable.

[MacPhilosopher]

...until you are holding a real 3G iPhone in one and and an EDGE iPhone in the other. This test is a joke. 3G will be nice, but not make a difference to many users. Some of us, however, will make the most of it.

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

We all know it will be faster but we won't really know how much faster it will be until we can actually compare them side by side.

[Phlake]

What I don't get is the long delay when starting up the Calculator. It comes up and then a second (or so) later the number shows up in the display and you can start using it. Why is that so slow?

The buttons that you see when you first start the calculator are not actual buttons. Instead what you are seeing is what Apple calls a Launch Image. The Launch Image allows the phone to hide some of the application launch time by making the application appear to have already loaded. The application is fully loaded when the numbers appear on top of the buttons, replacing the original image.

If you have a Apple Developer Connection account you can read more about this topic here (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/IconsImages/chapter_12_section_3.html).

[Laglorden]

Um, yeah. My wired broadband is 512kbit/sec. Ain't no way the wireless 3G speeds are gonna even approach that. Australia's telecommunications infrastructure totally sucks dead rats.

The government is talking nation-wide upgrade to 12Mbit... but in, like, 5 years. By which point it will still be a joke thanks to advances in other countries like Sweden.

My wired broadband is 100Mbit both ways and it's 99 SEK (about 15 US dollars @ current exchange rates) Sorry, couldn't resist rubbing some salt in those wounds ;)

But there is a BIG migration going on from wired broadband -> 3G currently here I think. Probably cause it's cheap, it's faster than (most) people need and it's easy.

But don't worry, this country is a total arse in other ways so it evens out ;)

[bowler357]

...until you are holding a real 3G iPhone in one and and an EDGE iPhone in the other. This test is a joke. 3G will be nice, but not make a difference to many users. Some of us, however, will make the most of it.

It would be like someone putting out a benchmark for a PowerBook G5. Hard to fairly benchmark something that doesn't yet exist (outside of Apple anyway). It's also likely to have other hardware specifications that would impact a comparison to the Gen. 1 iPhone.

[jaywilliams]

Um, yeah. My wired broadband is 512kbit/sec. Ain't no way the wireless 3G speeds are gonna even approach that. Australia's telecommunications infrastructure totally sucks dead rats.

The government is talking nation-wide upgrade to 12Mbit... but in, like, 5 years. By which point it will still be a joke thanks to advances in other countries like Sweden.

(Meanwhile, instead of doing the sensible thing and making parents responsible for their childrens' internet usage, they plan to lock the country down like China. I mean literally - they are using China as the template for Australia's internet censorship laws. Tech-wise, this country is total arse.)


You should be aware that services up 24mbit via ADSL2 are already available in australia dependant on where you live and that's through decent providers other than telstra.

And as for wireless, all of our mobile networks also currently support HSDPA at least up to 3Mbit with upgrades on the way and telstras 850mhz network had faster speeds again (if you want to pay through the nose for it). Well over your quoted wired broadband speed.

So it's not quite as gloom and doom as you might make out.

Jay

[winterspan]

My wired broadband is 100Mbit both ways and it's 99 SEK (about 15 US dollars @ current exchange rates) Sorry, couldn't resist rubbing some salt in those wounds ;)

But there is a BIG migration going on from wired broadband -> 3G currently here I think. Probably cause it's cheap, it's faster than (most) people need and it's easy.

But don't worry, this country is a total arse in other ways so it evens out ;)

Broadband is a mess in the United States outside of a few regional areas that have competing cable and fiber-optic service. Basically, the phone lines are much older and crappier than their European equivalents, which has limited average DSL speeds to about 1-1.5Mbit/s. Worse, the idiot politicians (while the conservatives were in control) changed the telecommunications laws so that the cable and phone companies don't have to offer competitors wholesale services that can be resold to the public --- basically giving them a total monopoly. In most areas, including the 5 states I've lived in, an individual home or apartment will only have access to ONE cable company and if you are lucky, ONE DSL provider. There are some small-scale wireless ISPs that offer what is basically a 5+ miles WiFi link. My parents have that type of system. $100/month for 3mbits.
If you are really lucky, you live in an area where there is a fiber-to-the-home provider like Verizon. In those areas, the competing cable companies jack up the speeds and lower the prices to compete with cheap, high-speed fiber service. You can get up to bi-directional 50mbps, but that is generally expensive. 15mbit/down and 5mbit/up service is around $30-50/month. You sure as hell can't get anything for $15/month.
In areas where fiber is not available, cable broadband speeds and prices vary considerably. I would guess the average cable service speed tops out at 6-10mbit/s down and 1-2mbit/up for around $40-50/month. It's funny, in considering moving out of the country, I have broadband speeds/costs listed near the top for priorities. :)

[jons]

Meh, pretty useless comparison...

[DeuceDeuce]

It still took 16 seconds to load a page?

Hm.

3G impresses me less and less. If the next iPhone simply has 3G and GPS as the only additional things, I won't think about upgrading. 3G isn't anywhere in my area anyway!

But I am surrounded by wifi...


Same here, 16 seconds? That isnt worth the price for me to upgrade. Im actually really glad!

[elppa]

I think the point of HSDPA is it enables different ways to use the network — video streaming, video conferencing etc., which is much harder to do over EDGE.

The “it loads a webpage a few seconds faster” bit is still relevant, but less important.

[Telp]

The difference in speeds was not a big deal. Sure, the 3G was faster, but so little so that it doesnt make a huge differene. We'll see when they come out officialy, we shall find out how the iPhone handles it.

[VideoShooter]

Time will tell.

Why not just say "I breathe air" or "water is wet".

If you don't have anything to say... don't.

[s1m]

You should be aware that services up 24mbit via ADSL2 are already available in australia dependant on where you live and that's through decent providers other than telstra.

And as for wireless, all of our mobile networks also currently support HSDPA at least up to 3Mbit with upgrades on the way and telstras 850mhz network had faster speeds again (if you want to pay through the nose for it). Well over your quoted wired broadband speed.

So it's not quite as gloom and doom as you might make out.

Jay

Hmm it may not be doom and gloom but it certainly rubbish. We seem to be hamstringing the metropolitan areas because we have to have "equal" ervice in the Bush and metro.

It may not be cocnuts on strings but we are a fair way behind what a cutting edge country like Oz should be...

[wolfstocktrader]

My main complaint with Edge is not speed. After all, historical price quotes on Yahoo finance take only 7 seconds.

The main problem is that when you are browsing on Edge, you cannot receive phone calls. 3g WILL allow phone calls.

Otherwise, I can live with Edge.

[sleepingworker]

Guess a lot of first gen iPhones will be on ebay in a month or two ...

[Snide]

Yeah...the way 3G people were beating up Apple for choosing Edge, I thought 3G was like the second coming. So it appears it might be twice as fast (at least on that guys street hehe). I'm glad something is coming along faster and all, but I'm a bit disappointed. Certainly not "Broadband" speeds at least in the U.S...

I like your "second coming" comment. Here's a post I made late last year comparing iPhone
speeds on Edge, MacBook tethered to iPhone via EDGE, and iPhone on Wi-Fi vs MacBook.
Very interesting to say the least!

3G is not the second coming of Christ - prepare to be disappointed (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4606072#post4606072)


Although I'm sure you do it- Fully shutting down and Restarting the IPhone from time to time does help with some of the speed issues that occassionally pop up (just like restarting a computer).

As you can see in the linked thread above, rebooting the iPhone, clearing Safari
cache, ect, made no difference whatsoever.

[duke49er]

So 3G is faster than EDGE. Was a speed comparison really necesary? Doesn't everybody and their whore of a mother know that already? What exactly was this supposed to prove?

[willcodejavafor]

*starts chant*

3G iPhone, 3G iPhone, 3G iPhone :D

My sister has an iPhone now and yes, its nice, great, does what we want... but I'd prefer 3G.. more coverage in the UK =)

Umm

Edge works fine for me. I'm mostly in London so maybe some little village outside could have problems but I doubt it would have 3G then. I thought 3G is on top of Edge when 3g cannot find cover anyway.

Lots of people seem really confused about this whole Edge/3G thing. I dont know where all this misinformation comes from.