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Posted Thursday, November 05, 2009 by Adriana Lee | ||||
In a previous post, I got slammed for perceived bias against T-Mobile. I mentioned the voice outage that affected various users across the country, coupled with the Sidekick/Danger data gaffe, and implied that cost savings might not be worth this kind of hassle. Truth is, if any carrier was plagued with these kinds of issues within such a short period of time, I would’ve called them out the same way, so I wasn't apologetic then. But I might be eating my words now — especially if that recent blowout had anything to do with what I’m about to report:
It seems Tmo is preparing to launch its new HSPA 7.2Mbps 3G network. Not only that, but various subscribers are already experiencing sudden bouts of fast speeds. The guys at AndroidandMe confirm that on average, users — specifically in Chicago and New York City — are getting 5.4Mb/s and 3.8Mb/s, respectively. (Apparently, a simple reboot is all that’s needed to enable the crazy fast 3G connectivity.)
While there hasn’t been an official announcement on the rollout yet, most are predicting it will happen by the end of the year.
This puts everything in a new light. T-Mobile’s official word on the outage was that it was due to a back-end system software glitch that resulted in “abnormal congestion,” but there were no specifics mentioned of why or how that happened — or which back-end system caused the gaffe. TmoNews wonders if it could be tied to this 7.2 rollout.
Oh boy, if that’s true:
Then I am truly sorry, Magenta, for besmirching your network. Rollouts are never smooth, and if errors happen in the course of upgrading to a lightning fast new 3G network, then it’s all for the good. No, not good — really amazingly great. So I’m sorry, Tmo. I like your funky personality. I love your customer service. And your phone lineup is getting better by the day. So can we be friends again? Please?
As for all the Tmo customers in the house, are you experiencing a boost in 3G speeds? Report in and let us know. (If you’re wondering how to check, AndroidandMe has the following how-to: “Download the Xtreme Labs Speedtest and post your results (make sure WiFi is turned off). Run the test a couple times and share what you find. If your phone is rooted, tether it to your laptop/netbook and try running a test on speedtest.net. I have found I received much higher download speeds when tethered vs. just testing on an actual device.”)
Via: AndroidandMe, TmoNews, PhoneArena, PhoneScoop
How do I know this, and how can you see for yourself? Turn off 3g and go EDGE only. You'll see that the same speed tests are STILL very fast - way faster than EDGE. That's because compression is happening on both EDGE and 3G, and not due to any 7.2 rollout at all, sorry to burst the bubble.
Now, one may wonder - who cares, as long as browsing is faster, right? Well, yeah it is nice and all. But it won't help with VOIP or streaming radio/video one iota. That's because those items are pre-compressed and there's not much network compression can do to help with that. So you won't be able to suddenly stream HD content where you couldn't before. The biggest thing is a little faster response time loading webpages that are heavy on HTML (and light on images), and impressive numbers on speed test sites that don't use pre-compressed data to do the testing.