HSDPA versus ADSL
At a potential 1.8 Mbps HSDPA is in theory the fastest broadband offering in South Africa, but in the best-effort broadband environment advertised speed is seldom a good indication of actual performance.
MyADSL set out to see just what Vodacom’s HSDPA could do, and pit it against Telkom’s fastest ADSL product, DSL1024.
Two sets of tests were performed on each service: one shortly after midnight and the other during the early morning working hours.
These tests involved web based speed tests, latency tests, software based downlink and uplink testing and file downloads. The testing procedure was by no means exhaustive, but it did give an indication of the relative performance of the two offerings.
The results were not a complete surprise, but the tests involving international latency and speed testing did produce a few unexpected revelations from HSDPA.
ADSL outperformed HSDPA when it came to local speeds, local latency and large downloads. HSDPA came to the fore in the international services arena and showed its true class.
In testing, the average local ADSL downlink speed was 828 kbps while HSDPA was 564 kbps. This testing relied mainly on web based speed tests which may be why these results can seem high.
International testing was more comprehensive (web based speed testing, large file download and TCPIQ) and here the results favoured HSDPA.
The average international download speed on ADSL was 452 kbps with HSDPA only just pulling ahead at 503 kbps. In the uplink department ADSL was king at 249 kbps while HSDPA gave a rather disappointing average of 48 kbps.
Local ping times proved that within South Africa ADSL is hard to beat at an average of 60 ms. HSDPA came in at 142 ms.
The most interesting result was international latency. The average ping time to international servers for ADSL was 372 ms, compared to 339 ms for HSDPA. While HSDPA had a far larger range, it consistently gave lower times than ADSL to both the UK and US.
The maximum speeds achieved whilst testing HSDPA were superior with a downlink speed of 1576 kbps compared to 1002 kbps for ADSL. One should note that these speeds are definitely not the norm, and especially in the case of HSDPA the average is far from this maximum.
More in-depth and accurate tests will take place at a later stage, but this basic analysis proved that HSDPA has the potential to live up to some of the hype. If the current performance can be maintained and reliability guaranteed it is definitely a very attractive broadband service.
But before you cancel your ADSL connection there are a few points worth considering.
Firstly, price remains a big distinguishing factor when comparing a wired offering like ADSL to wireless broadband offerings like HSDPA, MyWireless and iBurst. Vodacom’s HSDPA at around R 500-00 per Gig, is far more expensive for high usage. This makes the likelihood of a mass migration from Telkom’s ADSL service to the Vodacom network unlikely.
Secondly, ADSL has further proven to be a relatively reliable and stable service and the higher upload speeds make it suitable for services which require a more symmetrical offering.
So which service reigns supreme in the South African broadband landscape?
This testing was far too elementary and limited to draw any firm conclusions, but we can at least say that DSL1024 will have to watch in the rear view mirror for the fast approaching ‘fired up’ HSDPA data card.
Or is it the other way around?
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