gprs speed test

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noswal

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I've done a couple of speed tests with my phone connected to laptop and get about 42kbps down and 9 kbps up with a 5.4KB transfer rate - is this a good or bad average speed?





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I also get the same with my SE T210, here in Eastern Pretoria.

It is mainly dependand on 2 things :
1. Your phone. It sounds like a 4+1 phone, i.e. you can use up to 4 slots of 9600bps each.
2. How congested your nearest tower is. Thanks to the celphone triopoly, this rarely happens.
 
The speed is determined by the following:
1. Timeslot capability of the handset
2. Quality of signal
3. Congestion on the link to the site you are accessing for the test
4. How busy the network is on that cell.

The following are typical handset capabilities : Class 6 (3 timeslots down +1 up); Class 8 (4 + 1) and Class 10 (4 + 2).
Each timeslot is a maximum of 12kbps (radio speed) per timeslot. Some literature says 13.00 kbps but I think that is too optimistic.
Taking a Class 10 phone like the Nokia 6230, it can do 4 x 12 = 48 kbps downlink and 2 x 12 = 24 kbps uplink. These are maximum air interface speeds so after removing 5 - 10% for protocol overhead you should get up to around 44 kbps down and 22 up.
If the signal is poorer you get a slower data link approaching 9 kbps per timeslot.

From your report it is not fully clear on your handset capability but it does look like a single timeslot uplink capability (which could go slightly faster) and either a fast 3x timeslot down or a slow 4x timeslot down.
 
I get about the same...

I've been getting about the same speeds on GPRS with a 6680 on bluetooth at my home. Peaks at about 5.5Kbyte/sec, which is 44Kbps. Never measured the uplink speed -- I'm just watching the traffic graph in KPPP.

But I thought that GPRS+ was available everywhere on MTN. Doesn't this mean that the phone can switch to CS3 & CS4 in good signal conditions (GPRS only uses CS1/CS2?), which should give a maximum bitrate/timeslot of about 20-23Kbps? I'm about 800m from the cell tower and typically have 6/7 bars or full signal strength, but I don't think I see speeds over 40-50Kbps.

Also, according to the coverage map, I should have EDGE coverage at home (Cell ID is Mtunzini, I haven't seen Y'ello Broadband). I'm wondering if this is still in the pipeline? Strangely enough, I don't yet seem to have used EDGE -- I'm either in a GPRS only cell (Mtunzini, Strand, Empangeni/Sanlam Center), in a 3G cell (DBN & CT airports). 3G gave really good transfer rate peaks -- 200kbps->400kbps.
 
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