Sounding rather like the saga surrounding home broadband speeds, a recent survey suggests that mobile broadband users aren’t always getting the maximum speeds advertised.
Broadband Expert’s research, based on testing around 1,200 connections, found the average speed of UK mobile broadband is 1.46Mbps. This is around half the speed of the average home broadband speed of 2.95Mbps.
Vodafone’s offering fared the best with a top recorded speed of 2.3Mbps, although they have advertised speeds of up to 7.2Mbps — about the fastest speed HSDPA currently operates at. To be fair, though, some of those surveyed were on lower speed contracts.
T-Mobile fared less well, with a top speed of just 1.1Mbps, while 3 came in at 1Mbps. As O2 has only just launched its mobile broadband offering, no data was available on the service.
The average speed of upload (data going from phone to network) was 0.38Mbps. It’s an important figure to measure if the user wants to use VoIP services, or is planning to upload multimedia data to a blog or other online service from their mobile.
Read the fullstory in ‘Tech Digest’ here.
1 Comment
Holly from mobiEnthusiast.mobi
These broadband speeds are exactly why the development guidelines from ready.mobi are so important to follow. Developers need to take into consideration that sites need to load quickly and graphics need to be compressed in order to make the sites manageable for end users.
There are examples of sites that load properly at http://mobienthusiast.mobi and I would encourage anyone making websites for phones to avoid using tables, iframes, large graphics, popups and other things that phone browsers cannot handle.