I know several people with 3G mobiles and have opened web pages at the same time as them to see how EDGE on the iPhone compared to their super amazing 3G, in most cases the 3G was faster but we are talking 15 seconds compared to 20 on an iPhone, on complex pages 30 seconds compared to 35 on the iPhone. Quicker, but really nothing to get excited about. Broadband it is not.
The major problem with your criticism is that you are comparing apples and oranges. The iphone has a faster processor, more RAM, and more advanced rendering engine than most cell phones which allows it to render webpages to the screen at a faster rate than most once it has the data. Therefore, comparing an EDGE iPhone to most other 3G UMTS/HSDPA phones is not a valid comparison as you have two different variables at play. I can assure you, barring problems with signal strength, local network conditions, etc, when you compare the coming 3G HSDPA iphone to the EDGE phone, it will be much faster at loading webpages, due to it's 3-5x faster data rate, and MUCH lower latency, especially with the rollout of HSUPA in addition to HSDPA (assuming the iPhone can support HSUPA (upload side of 3G)).
The other thing to realize is that a 3G iphone is useful for more than just things such as online video streaming, videochat, large file downloads, etc.
Most people don't give it much thought, but the fact is that the average website has become much more complex with liberal use of large image-heavy design, AJAX/Javascript code, animations, etc. Many webpages are also now done blog-style with ten's of content posts on one page, and many others have public comments on each article which can really increase the overall size of the page as well. All of this increased complexity and interactive functionality has lead to even modest webpages being bloated in size. Earlier this year, I did a size check for some common websites. Note that the tests were done on article/post/subpage-type webpages and NOT ON THE FRONTPAGES. You'd expect frontpages, especially in blog type websites, to be even much higher than the results below.
websites:
engadget.com (random post) 420KB
yahoo.com (news article) 585KB
nytimes.com (news article) 345KB
seedmagazine.com (article page) 223KB
discovermagazine.com (article page) 731KB
livescience.com (article page) 438KB
tgdaily.com (subpage) 253KB
technologyreview.com (subpage) 247KB
macrumors.com (forum page) 207KB
tmz.com (blog post) 433KB
Average: 389KB/page.
So you can easily see why even basic web browsing can benefit from 3G vs EDGE. Additionally, not only is the data transfer rate itself much higher with 3G than EDGE, but the latency is vastly reduced as well. Loading an average webpage requires 15-30 individual HTTP requests for images, icons, CSS files, javascript files, etc. The longer it takes for each request and corresponding response to go through the network, the longer it will take to load the entire page. Both of these improvements that come with 3G should make the subjective experience of browsing the web more satisfying than with EDGE.
I think the reason 3G doesn't seem super-faster than EDGE is latency. Loading a Web page involves a lot of requests, and there are latency issues. Once a file starts coming in you get it at a good clip, but the response time isn't better than EDGE.
So a Web page loads a bit faster than EDGE, but the real advantage comes in when you are getting a big file like an image or PDF, or streaming in stuff like a QuickTime or YouTube movie. There, we will see things move!
You are technically correct in that basic 3G/UMTS doesn't really improve the latency very much compared to EDGE,
HOWEVER, nearly all areas that have UMTS rolled out ALSO have HSDPA rolled out and most also have HSUPA as well. HSDPA ("3.5G" download) and HSUPA (3.5G upload) both vastly reduce the latency of the respective paths from/to the device. I don't have any on hand, but head over to dslreports.com to see speed test numbers.
I hope this means that Apple will finally release a model that works on either Verizon or Sprint's networks. If not then the iPhone will still be a crippled regular phone with a large screen, not a smart phone by the majorities standards.
Since 3G won't even touch WiMax it's a day late and a dollar short, hopefully Apple will release a phone that is opened to the other, more powerful networks now that the SDK will allow developers to make business worthy software for it.
As much as I wish I were wrong, I don't think Apple will even ever make a CDMA iphone. By the time their exclusivity period is up, which most sources say is 5 years, Verizon will probably have 4G/LTE/HSOPA rolled out along with AT&T and Tmobile, and who knows where sprint will be.
Also, I have some hope for Wimax, but it's just wrong to say that "3G won't even touch wimax". Actually, 3G HSDPA/HSUPA can scale up to 14.4Mbps for download and 11.5MBps for upload. Obviously these are best-case scenarios, but so are the numbers you see quoted with Wimax. Both technologies will both get around 1-3 mbps both ways in the real world.
I just don't hear a lot of complaints about Edge. I actually turn off the wifi so that I don't waste time with my iPhone looking at random networks. Edge actually seems to work fast enough for data in most situations. Of course, heavy graphics or photo pages may slow it down, but what a lame use for an iPhone anyway. I noticed that many of the people posting on this subject have iPod Touches or no iPhone. Have you spent time with one? Does anyone have a comparison of download speeds from the two networks? I will say that YouTube would improve with a faster network, but is it Edge, or just that YouTube is always pounded with so many queries that their servers can never keep up? How will 3G help with this type of problem. I bet that within a month of 3G's arrival, you are all on this same site complaining about a lack of 4G.
I would have to ask you the same question. Acknowledging the problems with direct comparisons I layed out above, have you actually used a decent 3G EV-DO or UMTS/HSDPA (AT&T) phone and compared it to EDGE on the iPhone? It really is much faster, and it's more useful than many people are led to believe when you actually add up how much time is lost to waiting for things to load. If you take a look above at the webpage size comparison I listed above, then you can see it doesn't take a large photo gallery or CNN video stream to see the utility of having a connection that is 3-7x faster than EDGE. As far as your idea of server congestion, just load Youtube or whatever else on your home broadband connection and then see if it is the server or your slow phone connection.
And for speed tests, go to
www.dslreports.com . Despite the name, they have speed tests from every type of internet connection and ISP/Cell provider.
