GPRS speed with HSDPA card

[mohammedm]

I have an Option HSDPA card. I live in the city centre in Cape Town in an old house. The minute I enter my house, all cellphone reception ceases (VC, MTN and CellC).

There are 2 isolated spots in the house where I can get a good 3G connection with good download speeds. Elsewhere I mainly get 2 red flashes on my card or sometime 3 red flashes (GPRS).

The problem is that the GPRS speeds "appear" to be even slower that a 56k dial-up modem. Vodacom3G, can this be so?

 

[vodacom3g]

I have an Option HSDPA card. I live in the city centre in Cape Town in an old house. The minute I enter my house, all cellphone reception ceases (VC, MTN and CellC).

There are 2 isolated spots in the house where I can get a good 3G connection with good download speeds. Elsewhere I mainly get 2 red flashes on my card or sometime 3 red flashes (GPRS).

The problem is that the GPRS speeds "appear" to be even slower that a 56k dial-up modem. Vodacom3G, can this be so?

Best bet is to run a speed test, or watch the bottom of the dashboard to see what speeds you're getting. The 3 red flashes implies you're getting EDGE, so should see speeds of around 150Kb/s on EDGE.

But the fact that your signal is bad, probably is causing the card to fall to a lower coding scheme, resulting in low throughput.

Sounds like a perfect application for an external high-gain antenna. Should sort you out.