A first taste of Vodacom’s HSDPA
This service runs on their commercial network and should give a good indication of what users can expect from this new offering.
While the data card looks very similar to the traditional 3G card, the performance is most definitely very different. I must say that we had excellent signal strength, so this is likely the upper limit of what can be expected from this service.
Regular surfing is visibly quicker than 3G for both local and international sites.
Running Telkom’s local speed test gave an impressive result of 1779 kbps. Another local speed test, this time from Sentech, gave 905 kbps.
International web based speed tests from Germany and the US gave 907 kbps and 974 kbps respectively.
International download speeds ranged between 183 kB/s and 90 kB/s. Local downloads performed at similar speeds to the international ones.
One of the major advantages of HSDPA is the lower latency and it showed in our testing.
Local ping times ranged between 96 ms and 146 ms, while most international pings were in the region of 370 ms.
The performance of Vodacom’s HSDPA service is superior to any other local wireless broadband service we have tested, and even competes favorably against Telkom’s high-end ADSL services.
Whether they will be able to maintain these performances when the service becomes commercially availably in April remains to be seen, but what is certain is that it has the potential of providing users with a true taste of broadband in a mobile package.
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