HSPA+ coverage - Cell C and Vodacom compared

This means jack ISH when the prices to such coverage are more expensive than car payments!!

Not to mention the bandwidth cap! We have been crying this for years. No one seems to care about customers input in this country.
 
I'm in the center of Cape Town but no CellC 3g coverage - they're full of ****.
 
lol, Uys's comment wrt to 900Mhz coverage in urban areas is prob why there is poor coverage in CT and nothing officially in JHB. GSM refarming is not fun.
 
Uys says "...900MHz band allows for wider coverage per base station and better penetration through walls... but is impractical in urban areas..."

What makes it impractical in urban areas, especially considering it's better coverage & 25% increased penetration through walls? Or is Uys trying to discredit CellC's efforts? My CellC 3.75G device works perfect in Cape Town urban...

I've tested the speed/connectivity from 4 locations in Brackenfell, spanning about 10km square... works really well... maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones!
 
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Are you sure about where you are cause I haven't heard of that place before :confused: no wonder you having poor reception :whistle:

TimTDP said:
I am in Bervliet, Cape Town, and Cell C reception is poor, even with a high gain aerial
Click to expand...
 
Epic fail on the article title... "HSPA+ coverage - Cell C and Vodacom compared"... wheres the comparison?
 
BGE said:
Epic fail on the article title... "HSPA+ coverage - Cell C and Vodacom compared"... wheres the comparison?
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Totally agree.

I don't see any comparison at all! This is like saying compare 1 and 2...

And what coverage is this, population, geographical!
 
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Where I live, near Wanderers, in Joburg :

MTN Data : GPRS
Vodacom Data : EDGE
Cell C Data : HSPA+

I live in a bit of a dip, not sure why Cell C is so good, the transmitter must be close (Melrose Arch ?).
 
BGE said:
Uys says "...900MHz band allows for wider coverage per base station and better penetration through walls... but is impractical in urban areas..."

What makes it impractical in urban areas, especially considering it's better coverage & 25% increased penetration through walls? Or is Uys trying to discredit CellC's efforts?
Click to expand...

its cos GSM uses a most of the 900Mhz band, and you need to refarm these frequencies in order to use UMTS 900 and GSM 900 in the same area. Now in an urban environment you have tons of GSM sites/carriers in order to handle all the voice/edge capacity due to the concentration of subscribers.So in order to accomodate the UMTS 900 you need to free up 5Mhz of the 900 band in a region where you would probably be using all of your licenced 900Mhz frequencies to handle all the traffic with the least amount of interference between sites.When you then consider that a GSM site can reach out as far as 15km + it makes it even more difficult as you need to ensure that no outlying sites are using the same 900 frequencies as the UMTS 900 band you are using.

This is why Uys makes his remarks and why he is quite right in saying so. It makes sense to use GSM 900/1800 and UMTS 2100 in urban environments and GSM 900 or 1800 and UMTS 900 in rural areas.
 
BGE said:
Uys says "...900MHz band allows for wider coverage per base station and better penetration through walls... but is impractical in urban areas..."

What makes it impractical in urban areas, especially considering it's better coverage & 25% increased penetration through walls? Or is Uys trying to discredit CellC's efforts? My CellC 3.75G device works perfect in Cape Town urban...

I've tested the speed/connectivity from 4 locations in Brackenfell, spanning about 10km square... works really well... maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones!
Click to expand...

Pieter Uys is suggesting that it is impractical for Vodacom, it is perfectly practical and working well for Cell C. The trick is to be able to do re-farming with the 900 Mhz frequency the operators have. Most of the traffic of VC sits on 900 Mhz whereas most of the traffic for Cell C was sitting on 1800 Mhz. They could re-farm, ie use the 900 Mhz for their HSPA+. Vodacom can do this inly with great difficulty.
 
This further confirms my perception that Cell C have caught the other operators napping, and taken advantage to get a leg ahead. I have gotten better Cell C data coverage and speeds everywhere I've tried so far compared to Vodacom, so it's nice to see my anecdotal perception backed up by proper statistics.

The biggest challenge with HSPA+ is backhaul capacity, Uys said.
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So you've had loads of money and loads of time, what have you been waiting for. As Uys says, this is the 'biggest challenge' - meaning, the main reason we've only been getting breadcrumbs from Vodacom is not the coverage 'per se', they just haven't provisioned enough data transfer capacity within the network. And why should they have? There was zero competition until now. Yet this is in many ways the 'easy' part. Now maybe they're making an effort now, but now they're playing catch-up.

Competition FTW.
 
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BGE said:
Uys says "...900MHz band allows for wider coverage per base station and better penetration through walls... but is impractical in urban areas..."

What makes it impractical in urban areas, especially considering it's better coverage & 25% increased penetration through walls? Or is Uys trying to discredit CellC's efforts? My CellC 3.75G device works perfect in Cape Town urban...

I've tested the speed/connectivity from 4 locations in Brackenfell, spanning about 10km square... works really well... maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones!
Click to expand...

What makes it impractical is that the cell size at 900MHz is much bigger than at 2.1GHz. In an urban area it is useful to have smaller cell footprints. The reason is that urban areas are generally more densely populated and therefore if a cell is too big, the bandwidth will be used up most of the time. With smaller cells operators can control to a certain extent how many users are using the resources of a specific cell.
 
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