Vodafone Vs Telecom - mobile 3G data speed

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#283624 18-Dec-2009 08:35

sansom: nitrotech

We hear you and it does sound like there must be an issue as you should have experienced a good improvement. Sometimes an oversight over a single small detail during an upgrade can mean it doesn't deliver. Agree that Speedtest is poor for measuring mobile data speed, but if you've noticed no improvement during normal browsing sessions then we have a problem.

I'll tell the team that we have information from a very good source that the upgrade in Rotorua hasn't worked and get them to look into it further.

Regards
Hamish

Thanks Hamish, significant improvement today, steaming video 1.50 was fully buffered by 22 seconds from international site and pages now fully displaying graphics, looks good

sansom

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#283803 18-Dec-2009 15:19

Yeah, no worries. We went there and gave the nodeB a good kick and Bob's your uncle....

Hamish

nitrotech

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#283906 18-Dec-2009 21:43

sansom: Yeah, no worries. We went there and gave the nodeB a good kick and Bob's your uncle....

Unfortunately it went slow again from about 10am for the rest of the day, but thanks to taking a look - i'm out and about over xmas and will see how it performs in different areas.

Cheers,

sansom

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#284299 21-Dec-2009 08:56

Ok ... just looking for my whip now.

As a general update, we've now upgraded over 750 of our 1200+ sites to remove any backhaul constraints.

Still some work to do early next year, but you should find performance on the majority of our network is now limited primarily by local user load on the RF carrier capacity. Ongoing, having more 2100MHz nodeBs with well defined (small) coverage areas is the way to increase user bandwidth carrying capacity. Something Vodafone is well advanced on due to 2100MHz being the primary focus of our 3G network rollout over the last 4 years.

Hamish

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#284967 24-Dec-2009 10:17

I haven't been following this thread but posting from a ZTE Telecom stick in the Wairapa....

I have two access devices with me, the Vodem stick and the telecom USB stick.

The Telecom stick is about 10x faster than the vodafone to load web pages.... Case closed...

Speedtest 2019-10-14

coffeebaron

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#288092 8-Jan-2010 12:01

A few re-tests:

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coffeebaron

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#288098 8-Jan-2010 12:20

Conclusions:

Well that's it from me for a while. Hope to do some HSPA+ later this year. A few concluding comments:

- Remember when looking at these results, speedtest.net tests are really only a snapshot of potential speed. It does not give "real life" indication of the total connection experience. However, they do show relative trends and so are still a very useful tool for comparisons.

- Telecoms' network has significantly less load than Vodafone. Not sure what the figures are, but at least 2-3 time less load would be my guess. This is a factor to take into account when reviewing these results. I'd say many of the results would be much closer, or possibly Telecom would struggle to keep up if the networks had similar loads.

- One thing that is very clear, a lot of work is going in to upgrading network capacity, and migrating through HSPA to HSPA+ etc. You will note by some of the re-tests, the difference before and after upgrades is significant. Many of the Vodafone's sites earlier this year will often tick a long at 200-300k, but now 2-3Mbps is much more the norm.

- In terms of overall reliability between the two networks: much of the coverage is much for much; Telecom better in some places & Vodafone in others. I do think Telecom have still some way to go on overall reliability. The majority of the time that I had issues of not connecting, timeouts etc, it was on Telecom - not enough to say they have a bad network, just a very good network that has some room to improve.

This year will be another great year for 3G mobile. Both Telecom & Vodafone have great networks that will become even greater. They will no longer be able to compete on "faster in more places", but will need to compete on what they that have to offer over their great networks instead.

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johnr

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#288219 8-Jan-2010 16:38

nitrotech:
johnr:
nitrotech: Is santa bringing us the vodafone mobile bb upgrade in Rotorua before Xmas?

Rotorua has already had some TLC

Hmm, i'm in the CBD and this is a typical speed test, I was in Tauranga the other day and noticed the difference there speedtest was about 2.7mbps down.

Perhaps a little more TLC required?

I am in Rotorua on holiday and I am getting a 2mbps down and 1.5 up

John

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#290468 16-Jan-2010 05:49

'The main objective behind the tests is to see what both networks are capable of over a range of signal strengths and variety of locations.'

Are you also considering the number of concurrent subscribers using PS services on the NodeB at that moment in time and are the tests performed during each networks Data Busy hour (for that day)... this could also have impact on your results. Although the max HSPA or HSPA+ bandwidth would be possible to test in exclusive use mode the design of W-CDMA on the air-interface is such that if demand is high then the bandwidth is shared and limited accordingly to keep the established connections active but not necessarily at max speed.

Also what is the byte size and regularity of pings for the ping tests used on pingtest.net? (believe it or not size and speed matters :-))

3G Mobile networks will also profile the CS/PS service accessibility/performance dependant on local events and significant dates in the year for key sites.

Just food for thought on your less than ideal results.

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nitrotech

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#290469 16-Jan-2010 07:23

johnr:
nitrotech:
johnr:
nitrotech: Is santa bringing us the vodafone mobile bb upgrade in Rotorua before Xmas?

Rotorua has already had some TLC

Hmm, i'm in the CBD and this is a typical speed test, I was in Tauranga the other day and noticed the difference there speedtest was about 2.7mbps down.

Perhaps a little more TLC required?

I am in Rotorua on holiday and I am getting a 2mbps down and 1.5 up

John

When I was on holiday in Auckland I was getting similar speeds (2-3mbps down), Papamoa and Tauranga also give good speeds but unfortunately Rotorua is still painfully slow, I still cannot recommend the Vodafone HSPA service to any of my clients that's why i'm sending half a dozen clients a week off to get a telecom data card.

Cheers.

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#291024 19-Jan-2010 00:15

Currently on holiday out staying out in back and beyond about 25 mins drive east from Hastings.

Using a Freebee MF626 from Telecom with my (work) Vodafone simcard was completely un-usable. Kept on switching between HSDPA and 3G. And hence it would stop while it retrained between the two, and my VPN dropped.. (farqing pita!)
Swapped out to my un-used 500GB Prepaid XT simcard, got a full set of bars, never missed a beat for the 4 hours I was working on it. Shame I had to use up 250MB of my own personal data plan on it doing it... Would have far preferred to use my work sim.
Just wished I had borrowed a Telecom CDMA card from a friend, could have compared all three.

Telecom XT - Win
Vodafone - Fail

And there I was going and complaining about Vodafone.... and Geekzone goes off the wire for 5 mins. I was just about to blame XT for it. But everything else was fine. MF must have been doing a backup ;)

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#291025 19-Jan-2010 00:17

Who knows what happened there? A few seconds of DB activity, but back it seems.

sbiddle

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#291048 19-Jan-2010 08:03

BarTender:Using a Freebee MF626 from Telecom with my (work) Vodafone simcard was completely un-usable. Kept on switching between HSDPA and 3G. And hence it would stop while it retrained between the two, and my VPN dropped.. (farqing pita!)

You do realise that it's normal for a data connection to continually transition between 3G mode and HSPA mode? Happens on all WCDMA networks continually depending on the data traffic.
I've never seen a data session drop during a transition though.

johnr

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#291061 19-Jan-2010 08:23

BarTender: Currently on holiday out staying out in back and beyond about 25 mins drive east from Hastings.

Using a Freebee MF626 from Telecom with my (work) Vodafone simcard was completely un-usable. Kept on switching between HSDPA and 3G. And hence it would stop while it retrained between the two, and my VPN dropped.. (farqing pita!)
Swapped out to my un-used 500GB Prepaid XT simcard, got a full set of bars, never missed a beat for the 4 hours I was working on it. Shame I had to use up 250MB of my own personal data plan on it doing it... Would have far preferred to use my work sim.
Just wished I had borrowed a Telecom CDMA card from a friend, could have compared all three.

Telecom XT - Win
Vodafone - Fail

And there I was going and complaining about Vodafone.... and Geekzone goes off the wire for 5 mins. I was just about to blame XT for it. But everything else was fine.? MF must have been doing a backup ;)

This would be a 900mhz 3G coverage area and you are using a Telecom XT device that supports 850mhz

BarTender

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#291075 19-Jan-2010 08:51

Johnr but the telecom xt device also supports 900mhz too.
I also tried my vodafone novatel 870, however that was equally unreliable.

The problem with the hsdpa / 3g transition is that if you are in a patchey area the modem can spend all it's time doing the transition and never give you a solid connection. Which is just as useful as having no call at all.

I'll give it another go today and see how it goes...

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