Which is faster - 3G or Wi-Fi?

[pj rage]

he did a test and is getting ~4000kbps.. which is wierd on his plan/speed.

in reply to the 2nd part, i was being a smart arse. we dont have access to fibre optic cables running through our front doors. fibre at 50mbps doesnt seem that good. i was hoping something more like 200mbps!!

I was just saying that he shouldn't freak out over one bandwidth test. Who knows how accurate the site he used is, and a number of other factors that could influence the outcome of a single test.

I didn't realize you were being a smart ass, sorry! And you may have been being a smart ass some more with the 200Mbps comment, but they are in fact slowly increasing the bandwidth. I think it went from 30 to 50 already and will continue going up I'm sure. I guess as soon as I have access to it, I'll have to "settle" for 50Mpbs, lol. But really, that's already alot of bandwidth!!! 200Mbps would basically be limited by the hard drive and network card of the client computer. And as a result, would be 'too much' for a lot of older computers.

 

[specops]

in the 3g iphone keynote video on apples site they compare the 3g, edge, wifi speeds in real time.

also i was getting today with 2-3 bars on 3G 250kbs that means in that commercial when they load the email attachment i would of downloaded it faster than the commercial so it seems correct to me...

 

[DoFoT9]

1. I was just saying that he shouldn't freak out over one bandwidth test. Who knows how accurate the site he used is, and a number of other factors that could influence the outcome of a single test.

2. I didn't realize you were being a smart ass, sorry! And you may have been being a smart ass some more with the 200Mbps comment, but they are in fact slowly increasing the bandwidth. I think it went from 30 to 50 already and will continue going up I'm sure. I guess as soon as I have access to it, I'll have to "settle" for 50Mpbs, lol. But really, that's already alot of bandwidth!!! 200Mbps would basically be limited by the hard drive and network card of the client computer. And as a result, would be 'too much' for a lot of older computers.

1. yes thats true, some servers might be slower because of their own bandwidth restrictions and whatnot. maybe he should run some more tests somehow.

2. haha thats ok!. 30-50mbps isnt all that fast, seeing as though here in australia we can get 24mbps ADSL2+. in respect to that, 30mbps doesnt seem that fast.. im sure ADSL2+ could be pushed and tweaked to easily hit 30mbps, im sure you can see my reasoning here.

cant wait till 2020 when we finally get fibre optics (australia aint that good for this kinda stuff).

 

[adversecamber]

lol i HIGHLY doubt you have fibre to your house, otherwise youd be paying $10k per month. ive heard the copper lines to the houses are very bad.

Actually you're HIGHLY wrong (and very rude). It's not £10,000. It's actually £10.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/mother.html

 

[JBaker122586]

That's bollocks.

Umm... in what way is it "bollocks?"

You do realize, yes, that you live in a country of 60 million people?
And you believe that the concerns of you, 1/60 millionth of the population, will be addressed by either the British government or a $25 billion a year company?

If you come to a meeting about my timeshare, I'll give you 4 round trip tickets to Disney World!

 

[Phil A.]

Actually you're HIGHLY wrong (and very rude). It's not £10,000. It's actually £10.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/mother.html

Erm, Virgin don't run fibre to your house: they run fibre to the street cabinet and copper co-ax from there.
Looks like another "misleading" advert for you to complain about

 

[JBaker122586]

Actually you're HIGHLY wrong (and very rude). It's not £10,000. It's actually £10.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/mother.html

Quick!
Go download a song from iTunes.
If it takes more than 4 seconds, it looks like you can take legal action against Virgin as well!

CHA-CHING!

 

[DoFoT9]

Actually you're HIGHLY wrong (and very rude). It's not £10,000. It's actually £10.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/mother.html

Erm, Virgin don't run fibre to your house: they run fibre to the street cabinet and copper co-ax from there.
Looks like another "misleading" advert for you to complain about

i rest my case.. running fibre to your house would cost an arm an a leg, or at least something around what i quoted. its not cheap for that stuff.

 

[adversecamber]

I didn't realise you were being quite so pedantic. Clearly the fibre doesn't run to my AirPort (and, to ansure there's no confusion, I'm talking about my wireless router, not Heathrow).

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 16GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A347 Safari/525.20)

I didn't realise you were being quite so pedantic. Clearly the fibre doesn't run to my AirPort (and, to ansure there's no confusion, I'm talking about my wireless router, not Heathrow).

I don't think it's pedantry: there is an important distinction between a true fibre to the house system and what you get from Virgin. Because the cable to your property is copper not fibre, the signal can drop off and reduce your speeds if the copper is poor quality or there is a significant distance to the cabinet. I'm fortunate in that the cabinet is less than 50 metres from my house and I enjoy full 20mb speeds. Other people have reported much worse experiences with virgin.

 

[DoFoT9]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 16GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A347 Safari/525.20)



I don't think it's pedantry: there is an important distinction between a true fibre to the house system and what you get from Virgin. Because the cable to your property is copper not fibre, the signal can drop off and reduce your speeds if the copper is poor quality or there is a significant distance to the cabinet. I'm fortunate in that the cabinet is less than 50 metres from my house and I enjoy full 20mb speeds. Other people have reported much worse experiences with virgin.

your quite a lucky chap!! im hitting 2MBytes/s (out of 20Mb/s) which means i drop about 500kbps maximum.

p.s. fibre = my wish!! (for when i get rich eheh)

 

[pj rage]

i rest my case.. running fibre to your house would cost an arm an a leg, or at least something around what i quoted. its not cheap for that stuff.

I'm not certain, but I thought the verizon FiOS DID run fiber to your house? I know the install takes 8 hours for them to do, and they need to mount a special converter box that is like 10in by 10in by 4 in or so. It was my understanding that this box converted fiber to coax (or whatever output it has). But like I said, I'm not 100% sure that's what this box does and that the fiber is run to the house.

I ran some new speed tests too with testmyiphone.com. After reading a post here, I got the impression that this guy knew how to run speed tests better than some other sites, so I tried it. I was getting ~5-7Mbps+ for wifi and 750Kbps to 1.5Mbps for 3g. And between 175Kbps and 225Kbps for edge.

The wifi number seem a little high, though. The guy said the testmyiphone site was optimized for iphones (I think by using a small footprint?), but I loaded it on my laptop and only was getting like 2Mbps. Which is weird because I've definitely hit 600kb/s download speeds = ~4.8Mbps. That site also gives latency, which was around 100ms for wifi and around 200-250ms for 3g. This could play into the loading times too, but I'm not sure exactly how.

 

[lewisd23]

I'm not certain, but I thought the verizon FiOS DID run fiber to your house? I know the install takes 8 hours for them to do, and they need to mount a special converter box that is like 10in by 10in by 4 in or so. It was my understanding that this box converted fiber to coax (or whatever output it has). But like I said, I'm not 100% sure that's what this box does and that the fiber is run to the house.

I ran some new speed tests too with testmyiphone.com. After reading a post here, I got the impression that this guy knew how to run speed tests better than some other sites, so I tried it. I was getting ~5-7Mbps+ for wifi and 750Kbps to 1.5Mbps for 3g. And between 175Kbps and 225Kbps for edge.

The wifi number seem a little high, though. The guy said the testmyiphone site was optimized for iphones (I think by using a small footprint?), but I loaded it on my laptop and only was getting like 2Mbps. Which is weird because I've definitely hit 600kb/s download speeds = ~4.8Mbps. That site also gives latency, which was around 100ms for wifi and around 200-250ms for 3g. This could play into the loading times too, but I'm not sure exactly how.

Make sure when you test on your laptop, their is no network activity so you get a large file to test from. On a laptop or desktop you would want like a 5MB + file for a 5 - 7mbps connection.

You could try this one on your laptop http://testmyiphone.com/speedtest.php?do=test&testsize=5000&r=yes&f=1

BTW. good speed you got there for 3G.

 

[pj rage]

Make sure when you test on your laptop, their is no network activity so you get a large file to test from. On a laptop or desktop you would want like a 5MB + file for a 5 - 7mbps connection.

You could try this one on your laptop http://testmyiphone.com/speedtest.php?do=test&testsize=5000&r=yes&f=1

BTW. good speed you got there for 3G.

Yeah, for every test I made sure I wasn't doing any other activity on either device other than the test.

I didn't note the size it used automatically, but I did notice that both the wifi and 3g tests (and wifi on the computer) said "test file was too small for your connection, repeating test with larger file size" or something to that effect. That's one of the things that I think is good about that site - it gives you a file size appropriate for your connection automagically.

 

[umop apisdn]

Somebody call..

 

[sibruk]

adversecamber, I am really not surprised at ALL that you are not achieving anywhere NEAR the speeds that Virgin quote. Virgin Media are notoriously bad. At virtually everything. Part of the problem, on most UK ISPs at least, is contention - you don't have 10Mbps of bandwidth to your home, rather multiple people share that 10Mbps.

If you are reviewing ISPs in the future, I would strongly suggest Be. I get 22Mbps down and 2.2Mbps up over ADSL2+. Quite remarkable for a single twisted pair.

But you're right. Those adverts are extremely misleading. There is absolutely no way that you could ever get a GPS location that fast, or get the applications and web pages to render that quickly. Forget the "theoretical maximum" of the HSDPA network - it's the iPhone 2.0 OS that isn't up to the speeds they are demonstrating - not yet anyway.

I think I'm going to get in touch with the ASA as well, because I would like nothing more than to see headlines saying "Apple has to withdraw adverts". It really does annoy me when I see companies selling products which simply cannot do what they say (and in this case show!). So somebody call me a Wambulance as well.