Over dinner last night, Jonathan Greene remarked how fast Rogers 3G network seemed. He lives in New York City. Hmmm… how fast is it, I wondered? This morning I tethered a phone to my PC, and ran the tests at speedtest.net, targeting the Toronto test server.
As you can see, while it’s not yet the same as DSL or Cable broadband at home, you can achieve a very respectable 1 megabit/s download and over 300 kilobit/s up. The ping time is a little stinky at 240 ms. However you look at it, though, Rogers 3G service delivers a pretty respectable mobile broadband experience.
Why does Speedtest label the ISP as Verizon business, however? Inquiring minds want to know.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Alec…good to meet you finally last night.
As you may have noticed, our hotel Wi-Fi is really fast too! I'm getting about 7000 kb down and 6000kb up according to speedtest.net.
Likewise Jason! I hadn't tried out the speedtest on the hotel yet. There's no wifi up here on the 16th floor. I've got ethernet instead.
Why do you need to tether to check your iPhone's download speed? Just go to http://www.inetworktest.com/ with Safari on your device. Or, buy the iPhone version of their app for $0.99 and use that.
Rogers HSDPA is fast! for now. We reported on the speed of the Rogers Network just a few weeks back. On just a 3.6MB laptop card (the network claims to support up to 7.2) saw sustained torrent download speeds of 250 KBytes/sec or 2MBps effective transfer rate. Note that this is ironically vastly faster (by a factor of 10) faster torrent speeds than you would see through a wire rogers cable connection thanks to the lack of packet shapping / P2P throttling.
http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/04/15/hspa-ftw-bitto…
It's labelled as Verizon Business as that's where the IP space is from. My guess is that Rogers just uses Verizon for the internet connectivity. They probably could have gotten their own IP space, but didn't do so.
- Jason