Vodacom 7.2 Mbps HSDPA
Vodacom has quietly gone about its business of upgrading many of its current HSDPA towers to 7.2 Mbps. This comes only two weeks after officially launching its 3.6 Mbps HSDPA offering country wide.
The lack of backhaul bandwidth capacity – something which is hampering both Vodacom and MTN in their mobile broadband rollout – however means that the service will not be launched commercially until the company’s transmission network has been adequately upgraded.
Despite the delay in a commercial launch the service is available at various sites in Gauteng, Cape Town, Durban and the Eastern Cape. Users however need to upgrade their profile in order to enjoy the new service – something which is currently only bestowed on a few lucky trial users.
Real world performance
MyBroadband was invited to test the new service in a live environment. The results were very promising.
The average throughput using local web based speed tests was 3062 Kbps while the average international download speed using the same testing method was 868 Kbps.
These tests however do not tell the full story as the true performance gain only became apparent when pushing the service a bit.
Using a download manager and opening multiple download threads showed a performance far superior to any other broadband offering in the marketplace today.
The average downlink speed using multiple simultaneous downloads ranged between 3.5 Mbps and 5.2 Mbps, depending on the download server location and network congestion. The download speeds peaked at 7.07 Mbps.
With these speeds one can expect to complete a 1 GB download in around 30 minutes, significantly faster than using a 4 Mbps ADSL service.
The performance of Vodacom’s 7.2 Mbps HSDPA service is very encouraging and if similar speeds are achieved when the service is launched commercially it will definitely dethrone Telkom’s DSL 4 Mbps offering as the premier local broadband service.
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