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Risco

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 22, 2010
1,946
262
United Kingdom
Tested my iPhone 5 this morning at home for the first time and was shocked at how fast it was! Sure upload is not amazing, but still reasonable enough for a phone!

I get unlimited data with tethering for only £36 a month. :cool:


Untitled by Riscon, on Flickr
 

jmmo20

macrumors 65816
Jun 15, 2006
1,163
102
Yep 3 is pretty awsome, I also have my iphone 5 with them.
Only thing is, signal is really poor inside my house. And yesterday I went to Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge. Had full signal bars and 3G. However speed was like this:

A8DwerpCQAAZ3kc.jpg


I couldn't believe it!!!
 

Risco

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 22, 2010
1,946
262
United Kingdom
They are doing a lot of network upgrades. I was getting speeds like that at my workplace until a couple of weeks ago. Now the speeds are crazy fast! Defo the best network for internet!
 

jmmo20

macrumors 65816
Jun 15, 2006
1,163
102
They are doing a lot of network upgrades. I was getting speeds like that at my workplace until a couple of weeks ago. Now the speeds are crazy fast! Defo the best network for internet!

I asked them on twitter and say they are aware and there are no plans.
My guess is that with mobile networks you need a balance between voice and data.

"Classical" operators have it very easy because they can force you to switch to GSM for calls. Three can't use GSM so they're limited to 3G. My guess is that they have configured their network around the hospital in a way that allows for very good voice quality, and although internet speeds are affected, they arent' the priority within a hospital.
 

tymaster50

Suspended
Oct 3, 2012
2,833
58
Oregon
So much better than what? And why?

CDMA and my family was switching to Verizon. CDMA is like dial up compared to 3G speeds GSM carriers offer. I mean it's reliable but a little slow.
Ah who am I kidding, it's not like I download apps or anything, for normal use it's perfectly fine.
 

jmmo20

macrumors 65816
Jun 15, 2006
1,163
102
I've read that on CDMA that when you are receiving an SMS your phone can't receive calls :O
 

Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,419
6,789
I get similar speeds with Three also on my iPhone 5. I have to admit before I got my iPhone 5 I was looking forward to getting LTE and perhaps switching to EE but after receiving great speeds on Three and the extremely overpriced deals EE are offering which lack any unlimited plan at all I've not even given it a second thought, I am sticking with Three for the foreseeable future.

And to think I actually joined this network back in 2003 when they launched and I had that horrible NEC e606 for £200 on their Contractless pay as you go plan. The battery life on that phone was so terrible it actually came with two batteries and you literally had to use both every day. Back then the network was a walled garden couldn't even access the web if you wanted to, only their little shop of rubbish videos and ringtones. Boy how times have changed :D
 

jmmo20

macrumors 65816
Jun 15, 2006
1,163
102
I get similar speeds with Three also on my iPhone 5. I have to admit before I got my iPhone 5 I was looking forward to getting LTE and perhaps switching to EE but after receiving great speeds on Three and the extremely overpriced deals EE are offering which lack any unlimited plan at all I've not even given it a second thought, I am sticking with Three for the foreseeable future.

And to think I actually joined this network back in 2003 when they launched and I had that horrible NEC e606 for £200 on their Contractless pay as you go plan. The battery life on that phone was so terrible it actually came with two batteries and you literally had to use both every day. Back then the network was a walled garden couldn't even access the web if you wanted to, only their little shop of rubbish videos and ringtones. Boy how times have changed :D


I wonder what was the point of 3G umts in 2003 if they didn't have web access!! But yeah things have changed a lot, specially since the first iphone launched!!! In Spain using internet on the phone was unheard of. I remember I had to pay 3 euro for 150kb (kilobytes!!!) with Vodafone to check my emails back in 2000 !!!
 

tymaster50

Suspended
Oct 3, 2012
2,833
58
Oregon
I wonder what was the point of 3G umts in 2003 if they didn't have web access!! But yeah things have changed a lot, specially since the first iphone launched!!! In Spain using internet on the phone was unheard of. I remember I had to pay 3 euro for 150kb (kilobytes!!!) with Vodafone to check my emails back in 2000 !!!

150kb back then is the new 2gb now. Hell you can go through 150kb just looking up a web page nowadays. That was back when 5GB was a ton of space.
 

Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,419
6,789
I wonder what was the point of 3G umts in 2003 if they didn't have web access!! But yeah things have changed a lot, specially since the first iphone launched!!! In Spain using internet on the phone was unheard of. I remember I had to pay 3 euro for 150kb (kilobytes!!!) with Vodafone to check my emails back in 2000 !!!

Back then when Three launched they touted video calls for the key feature of their 3G infrastructure. It was pretty much the only feature they advertised for the first year.

But it sucked, the video quality was incredibly poor, the 3G coverage was spotty as hell, dropped video chats were the norm and they had to license space on O2's 2G network to supplement their lack of 3G coverage. Another problem was the phones back then that supported the 3G standard were incredibly bulky, expensive (Three had to subsidize even their Pay as you go phones by hundreds of pounds) and the battery life was non-existent when actually on the 3G network.

There were a whole bunch of problems with their approach back then, the main one, people just didn't wanna do video calls on their phones. You had to plug in headphones to talk to the other people because none of their phones supported video chats without the headphones being used for sound and in general people just prefer to talk or text than video chat as Face Time on the iPhone has shown us (again).

But thankfully they wised up, eventually took down their walled garden as we called it back then and we can now all access the full internet on our Smart Phones and it's fantastic :D
 

Daveoc64

macrumors 601
Jan 16, 2008
4,074
92
Bristol, UK
So much better than what? And why?

CDMA (technically CDMA2000, but people abbreviate it) is an alternate type of mobile network that is used primarily in North America.

In many ways it's technically inferior to the more widely used GSM (2G) and UMTS (3G) systems (some of these problems have been mentioned above).

CDMA is not legal in Europe, so the networks here are all GSM, UMTS or LTE (4G).
 
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