vodacom GPRS slow

[Snowolf]

I pulled out my pre-paid mtn sim card today and decided to compare speed.
I am using a sony ericsson T610 4+1, so theoretical speed should be 48 kb/s
With vodacom I get 32 kb/s tops and with MTN i get 43 kb/s.
reception strength is the same.
just interesting thing is that there are only about 10 people in the area who even know how to use GPRS (the place is a small village where every one knows every one else) so the vodacom tower is not overloaded
tower id N***wana-2
I know that speed does not matter for me but why such a big difference in speed ?
I live about 2 km from the tower so poor reception is not an issue

[ScrnScrm]

Hi Snowolf. Voice calls also use time slots. The base station may have been busy with voice calls at the time you did your test.
How many download slots were you using? were you monitoring this in conjunction with the coding scheme on the bast station?

[Snowolf]

the vodacom speeds are the same regardless of the time. I have used it at 2 am, I doubt that there are many people using the phone at that time of the day.
the speed is slow. with regards to the time slots I can not see how many I use. I use a sony ericsson T610 over bluetooth, not much we can see WRT technical stuff, what i base my stuff on is the kbps test on the telkom page posted earlier in the forum
just in case any one was wondering, no i do not sleep :)
ask undertaker, he can confirm :)

[ScrnScrm]

LOL. Well maybe if you speak very nicely to MTNBB or V3G they can petition internally in their respective organisations to at least get the base stations upgraded to CS4 or EDGE. That will give you much better throughput.
Wrt the whole MTN/Voda speed issue - i am divided on it at the moment. I use both as well, and rather extensively. Up to about 2 weeks ago, I would have recommended MTN for GPRS and Voda for 3G without blinking an eyelid. However, at the moment I dont really see any difference between the two myself on GPRS.

[Snowolf]

7:18am . buisness has not started yet and the speed has dropped all the way down to 19kb/s !!!
full reception on the cell side.

pitty I no longer have a phone with netmonitor enabled and sony ericsson t610 does not have a facility to see tower stats....

mmm. i see the filters took out my full tower name..... :confused:
N G O D W A N A - 2 tower name.

[ajax]

Hi Snowolf

It is important to compare apples with apples. Where I live, I can pick up 1 EDGE tower from Vodacom and 1 from MTN. I have set up an external, directional antenna to my phone to increase the signal strength. I managed to find a sweet spot where I can pick up the MTN and Vodacom EDGE towers with the same signal strength of around -64 dBm (checked with a Nokia 6150 with Netmonitor; you can probably pick one up for R300 in a 2nd hand store, or even a 5110 for R200, but it is not dual-band)

In most urban areas one can pick up a few towers with more or less equal strength, so you can easily get switched over to a non-EDGE tower with only CS1 and CS2, giving you slow speed. For example, I deliberately switched to a different tower on MTN, with a stronger signal, and only got 33 kbps.

I have been running several comparitive speed tests lately. On the Telkom local http speed test found on this site, there's no difference for me between MTN and Vodacom. I usually get between 50 and 55 kbps with 3 time slots using a Nokia 6310i. International, I am still investigating.

[Dolby]

What are timelots ... ?

[Snowolf]

given, but what matters to me is that I click on connect and I connect. I don't want to use tricks to get a connection. its what happens on the connect that makes the diference for me.
I don't realy need to know what makes it tick as long as it ticks reliably (which vodacom does) but its just interesting why MTN is faster.

[billybobwoolmer]

A while ago someone told me that MTN standardised on erricson kit throughout there network where as Voda used an assortment . If this is true would'nt that account for speed degradation across Voda?

[ScrnScrm]

A while ago someone told me that MTN standardised on erricson kit throughout there network where as Voda used an assortment . If this is true would'nt that account for speed degradation across Voda?

yes and no. mtn are standardised on ericsson, and voda use siemens, alcatel and ericsson. the older vodacom kit doesnt support coding schemes above cs2, so if your local base station is one of these jobs, you are basically stuck with it until a. it breaks, or b. you get 3G. on voda's newer base stations with with EDGE support, you should get much of a muchness compared to mtn, depending on whether you are on 900 or 1800 band and your distance from the respective base transmitting station (bts).

here is a handy hint - go out and buy a prepaid card on both networks. plug into you phone, and test it. at any given location, one of the networks is bound to have better coverage by way of the fact that you will have better signal strength to a particular base station, or a particular provider has more available capacity. you should be able to do these tests for under R50, then just go with whichever one gives you the best performance for YOUR location.

hope this helps!

[ScrnScrm]

What are timelots ... ?

check out this thread :

http://www.mybroadband.co.za/vb/showpost.php?p=175745&postcount=17

[Snowolf]

well i guess there was something wrong with the tower, last night at about 23:30 the tower died. all i could pick up was the mtn tower.
at 00:20 the tower was back on line and the speed seems to be a little bit better, at least i don't wait 50 seconds just for the forum to load. :D

[Harley79]

Maybe someone was watching this forum, decided to kill your tower and fix it

[vodacom3g]

Very perceptive, Harley79 :) ,

The radio guys had a look at Snowolf's problem last night. Will check what they found.

Snowolf, please keep on providing your feedback. You can PM me if you like, or post here.

[Diago]

Vodacom3G is slowly becoming the forum's 007. State the problem and he'll make it dissappear before commenting on it. Lol.

Great work v3g - Is that martini shaken not stirred ?

[Snowolf]

well I have noticed a vast diference in speed, thanks V3G, this b one of the main reasons why i will stick with vodacom......

[Snowolf]

just for some tech info, I did the speed test and got the following results:
Download time: 59.609 seconds
Size of file: 500 KiloBytes
Estimated line speed: 68.4 (kilobits/second)
Estimated line speed: 8.4 (kiloBytes/second)

test 2 just cauz i could not believe my eyez:

Download time: 68.453 seconds
Size of file: 500 KiloBytes
Estimated line speed: 59.6 (kilobits/second)
Estimated line speed: 7.3 (kiloBytes/second)

V3G this is more than normal service, its actualy quite scary to recieve such good service :)

Cant wait till june to re activate my data package, may is a bad month.... will not be able to use PC at all... :(

this definatly is an improvement on my ISDN line.

[vodacom3g]

Thanks, I'll pass it on to the radio guys. They created more timeslots and upped the coding schemes.

[ScrnScrm]

Hi V3g - as a matter of interest - how many of the time slots on a typical base station are grps enabled. I know in the past only half were (4 or of the 8), but has that changed recently? Also, are you guys loading Coding Scheme 4 independantly or as part of an EDGE upgrade? The reason I ask is because you mentioned above that you upgraded the Coding Scheme, and I though it was policy at Voda to only do this during the hardware upgrade for EDGE?
Sorry for being so nosey :D

[vodacom3g]

Hi,

The way I understand it, cs3/4 are being done independently to the EDGE upgrades, which would be higher than 4.

As to the number of timeslots, I believe it's decided at capacity planning stage per base station.

Let me try and get an official statement from the planning guys.

[Snowolf]

and just to make sure I did another run:
Download time: 64.562 seconds
Size of file: 500 KiloBytes
Estimated line speed: 63.2 (kilobits/second)
Estimated line speed: 7.7 (kiloBytes/second)

I've been raving to every one today about the great service.
guess this is the only place that you guys get any kind of technical feedback.
short of granny susan phoning 111 because she does not know how to send a SMS.

[No 3]

how on earth do u guyes get 50k out of a vodacom gprs connection. lol i have a motorola v360 and during the day i get .5 to 2.2k and after one in the morning i get 4.5 - 9k/s. i could have just aswell used a telkom line and a 32k us robotics modem. and how one earth do other guys clock speeds like 360k - 600k that ive seen screenshots of and still others mentioning speeds of up to 2MB/s. i live close to a tower but the signel is weak on the motorora. my other old phone that uses cell c always has coverage...it jumps to mtn, voda or any available tower or network and the signel always stays full.

[Iam3G]

how on earth do u guyes get 50k out of a vodacom gprs connection. lol i have a motorola v360 and during the day i get .5 to 2.2k and after one in the morning i get 4.5 - 9k/s. i could have just aswell used a telkom line and a 32k us robotics modem. and how one earth do other guys clock speeds like 360k - 600k that ive seen screenshots of and still others mentioning speeds of up to 2MB/s. i live close to a tower but the signel is weak on the motorora. my other old phone that uses cell c always has coverage...it jumps to mtn, voda or any available tower or network and the signel always stays full.

I think you're getting confused between Kbps(Kilobits Per Second) and KBps(KiloBytes Per Second).

To my understanding, Kbps is your Connection Speed(this being 56Kbps) and deviding that by 8 to get your Transfer Speed(this being the speed your downloading or uploading from)

Anyone please correct me if i'm grabbing at straws? I derived that from HSDPA speeds where 3.6Mbps = 3600Kbps, which when devided by 8(because there are 8 Bits in 1 Byte) gives you the speed in KiloBytes Per Second.

[ic]

how on earth do u guyes get 50k out of a vodacom gprs connection. lol i have a motorola v360 and during the day i get .5 to 2.2k and after one in the morning i get 4.5 - 9k/s. i could have just aswell used a telkom line and a 32k us robotics modem. and how one earth do other guys clock speeds like 360k - 600k that ive seen screenshots of and still others mentioning speeds of up to 2MB/s. i live close to a tower but the signel is weak on the motorora. my other old phone that uses cell c always has coverage...it jumps to mtn, voda or any available tower or network and the signel always stays full.GPRS is based on 2.5G technology, and doesn't go higher than about 80kbits/s, whereas download speeds of around 2Mbits/s [with Vodacom], and higher, would be using 3.5G technology aka HSDPA.

By today's definition, when compared to 3.5G, GPRS is effectively the same as dialup, and therefore it is slow. Get yourself an HSPA modem if you have 3.yG coverage in your area(s).

PS: welcome to MyBroadband :).
I think you're getting confused between Kbps(Kilobits Per Second) and KBps(KiloBytes Per Second).

To my understanding, Kbps is your Connection Speed(this being 56Kbps) and deviding that by 8 to get your Transfer Speed(this being the speed your downloading or uploading from)

Anyone please correct me if i'm grabbing at straws? I derived that from HSDPA speeds where 3.6Mbps = 3600Kbps, which when devided by 8(because there are 8 Bits in 1 Byte) gives you the speed in KiloBytes Per Second.You're grabbing at straws.

Both kbits/s and kBytes/s are measures of data transfer speed where kBytes/s == kbits/s divided by 8.

Connection speed can be measured in either of those, but Connection speed is more of a theoretical concept [e.g. what Windoze says] and doesn't necessarily represent actual throughput [data transfer] speed.

Data Transfer Speed could also be measured in bits/s, Bytes/s, Mbits/s, MBytes/s, Terabits/s, TeraBytes/s, etc.

[Iam3G]

You're grabbing at straws.

Both kbits/s and kBytes/s are measures of data transfer speed where kBytes/s == kbits/s divided by 8.

Connection speed can be measured in either of those, but Connection speed is more of a theoretical concept [e.g. what Windoze says] and doesn't necessarily represent actual throughput [data transfer] speed.

Data Transfer Speed could also be measured in bits/s, Bytes/s, Mbits/s, MBytes/s, Terabits/s, TeraBytes/s, etc.

Thanks IC. I knew there was something i was missing.

[Snowolf]

I know this is a old post but I do need to give some feedback, vodacom have upgraded to 3g in our area, speeds are good