Cell C 21 Mbps HSPA+ tested

Cell C officially switched on its so-called “4Gs” HSPA+ network in Port Elizabeth last week.

Laptops equipped with Cell C’s new black Huawei E1820 21.1 Mbps dongles were available for attendees of the launch event to put the operator’s new network to the test.

According to Ron Reddick, Chief Information Officer at Cell C, the coverage at the event venue was all provided by a single sector of a base station.

One stand had 3 laptops connected to a single dongle to demonstrate simultaneous usage of social networking, video streaming, and “cloud-based” applications such as Google Docs.  Another stand was dedicated to running Ookla’s speed tests.

The real test, however, was when we were given E1820 modems to test in our own computers.

Installation was relatively painless on my Ubuntu machine. Once the connection was configured there were two tricks to get it to work: Delete the username filled in by default and specify DNSes.

Testing confirmed what was seen on display at the event: YouTube videos buffered faster than they were played back in 360p resolution and speed tests to the Speedtest.net server in Johannesburg yielded great results.

Speed tests to international servers told a different story, however.

The fact that a download from Cell C’s servers in Johannesburg attained speeds over 10 Mbps shows what the network is capable of.

The decrease in throughput to international servers raises some questions, but Cell C wasn’t immediately available for comment over the weekend after the tests were conducted. MyBroadband will provide updates as and when we receive comment from Cell C.

Upon returning to Gauteng it turned out that the modem still connected to a 3G network.

While speeds in excess of 10 Mbps weren’t achieved from the suburbs of Pretoria, the results outside Cell C’s official launch area remained quite good.

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