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iamthedudeman

macrumors 65816
Jul 7, 2007
1,385
246
I have an AT&T 3G card in my laptop and consistently get around 150-200 kb/sec. EDGE is definitely slower... maybe 10-20 kb/sec.


Oh, yeah. Just how are you testing these speeds. What card are you using. Your card will revert to EDGE when a 3g signal is not available, it will revert back to a EDGE connection. Trust me HSDPA is well over 1mps. You are on EDGE.
 

mashoutposse

macrumors 6502
Dec 13, 2003
371
45
The EDGE experience on the iphone is not bad at all. It is definitely usable if you are in an area that can get you 100kbps. The iPhone renders pages very quickly and does it a far higher quality than any of these 3G alternative devices.

I popped the SIM in my Blackjack; I would go as far as to say that the iphone can bring up pages at a comparable speed to the Samsung despite the BJ benchmarking at 1000kbps. Not to mention that the page rendering itself is absolutely night and day -- all things considered, I definitely prefer to browse on the iPhone.

Posted from my iPhone on the EDGE network.
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
15,728
1,902
Lard
From what I have read ATT's EDGE network pales in comparison to Verizon's and Sprint's EV-DO networks at this point in time. It seems that in my limited research, the EV-DO network is much faster than the EV-DO network.

I may be wrong, but the EV-DO network should at this point equal low end DSL speeds. The EDGE network at best seems to half the speed...

I regularly get decent DSL-like speeds from my EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimised) Rev. 0 Sprint/Samsung phone. I often see downloads on the computer breaking 100 KB/sec on Firefox with a maximum of about 170 KB/sec. but the average is usually around 85 KB/sec. with some lag. When I'm out of a metropolitan area, I see about 35 KB/sec. maximum.

Am I the only person in here with a comp sci degree that's bothered by some of you constantly using a lowercase "B" to refer to both bits and bytes? Please, if you're talking about bytes use an uppercase "B"... if bits then a lowercase "b".

I know what you mean. We have so many people talking about having 512 millibits of RAM. Then, there are the people who know it but can't deal with MB, so they have to put MiB since computers aren't decimal-based systems. :D
 

snook911

macrumors 6502a
Aug 13, 2007
889
0
Yorba Linda, CA
.... youtube is definately a nono on 2.5g.

after I read this I went on youtube and did not have any problem viewing videos. Took about 10-15 seconds for selection to come up, Picked a video took another 10-15 seconds for the video to start then it played all the way through no problems. 2.5g seems fast enough to do almost everything on the iphone. Large complex pages like Nascar.com take a while to load but other no so graphicly dependant are fine. I use google all the time including sat. view and have no problems with it.:D
 

kdarling

macrumors P6
Since this thread has been dredged up, it should also be noted that kilobits per second is not usually divided by 8 by engineers to get the _effective_ kilobytes (page sizes) per second when you're doing an evaluation.

With the overhead of IP, it's more like divide by 10 is a good rule of thumb for long downloads.

So 80 Kbits transmitted ~= 8 KBytes (not 10 KBytes) received and used.
 

AHDuke99

macrumors 68020
Nov 14, 2002
2,288
86
Charleston, SC
i tried spring's mobile broadband in a store today and it registered 1497kbps when i ran the speed test. it was very snappy. att's 3G is pretty fast to download things too, but surfing the web is about the same as edge. of course, it isnt available nearly as widespread as spring and verizon's 3G networks. EDGE is definitely fine for a mobile device, though. it checks email and uses google maps just fine.
 

freediverdude

macrumors 6502a
Dec 26, 2006
573
0
I just did tests on dslreports, bandwidthplace.com, and cnet, and they're all coming up between 100 and 200 kbps on the iphone, which places it several times higher than dial up, and just below dsl on cnet's comparison list. It seems fine. Little slower than my cable broadband, but acceptable.
 
The sad truth is that few web browsers on EV-DO are anywhere near as capable or easy to navigate as Safari (even worse when the phone is not a touch interface, or you need to enter text and "tab" through elements). Moreover, when out driving around, generally EDGE works great for me. Anytime I'm out eating and browsing the Internet, I don't think I ever get bored waiting for a download. If I do, I'm either tabbing over to another page to re-read something in the meantime... or taking another bite out of my sandwich. If EDGE were any faster, I'd never finish my food. :)

~ CB
 

bloodycape

macrumors 65816
Jun 18, 2005
1,373
0
California
The sad truth is that few web browsers on EV-DO are anywhere near as capable or easy to navigate as Safari (even worse when the phone is not a touch interface, or you need to enter text and "tab" through elements). Moreover, when out driving around, generally EDGE works great for me. Anytime I'm out eating and browsing the Internet, I don't think I ever get bored waiting for a download. If I do, I'm either tabbing over to another page to re-read something in the meantime... or taking another bite out of my sandwich. If EDGE were any faster, I'd never finish my food. :)

~ CB


I guess you never tried any of the mobile variants of Opera browser, or Firefox for mobile devices, those are just as capable as Safari.
 
I guess you never tried any of the mobile variants of Opera browser, or Firefox for mobile devices, those are just as capable as Safari.
I have, and I think out of appreciation of what great browsers like Opera have done in raising the bar for the mobile web, you've allowed yourself to be grossly out of touch with the phrase "just as capable".

When you tap a menu in Opera, can you use your thumb to roll through the options like a slot machine? Can you double-tap on an HTML element, whether it be an image or a DIV tag, and have it automatically zoom in? Is their environment so fluid and rich, that people have begun building web apps like BeeJive or SeeqPod that take advantage of the flexibility and performance of its Ajax and multimedia capabilities?

I'm sorry, even going to the Opera website and looking at their demos, anyone can see a night and day user-experience difference. It doesn't take anything away from Opera to say this either. Safari has a much much better platform to run on. If Firefox and Opera ran on iPhone's mobile OS X, I have every confidence that these versions would blow away their Windows Mobile and Simbian counterparts too, but it would take much more development than where they're at now.

Agreed?

When I said, "few web browsers on EV-DO are anywhere near as capable or easy to navigate as Safari", I really meant it. Not for EV-DO's limitations or the incompetance of browser makers, but due to poor phone platforms. Unfortunately. I was looking at a demo of the Helio Ocean web browsing on YouTube, recently, and it was paaaaaainful looking.

~ CB
 
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