Cellular27.06.2018

How much we downloaded in 24 hours using Rain Mobile’s “Unlimited Data”

Rain sim

Rain recently announced it was giving customers unlimited free data for June, and refunding SIM delivery costs, following problems with deliveries to users.

Many users who ordered mobile SIM-only and device bundles from Rain did not receive their orders after placing them.

“As you know, we’ve experienced a few problems due to an overwhelming response to our offer, but we’d like to make it up to you,” said Rain in its offer of free data to customers.

Once June comes to an end, Rain Mobile customers will then be able to use their “unlimited data days” allotments they received when ordering their packages. These range from 15 days to 90 days of unlimited usage.

Rain Mobile tested

To see how much data you can squeeze out of a Rain Mobile SIM in a day during the June unlimited data period, and the unlimited data days which follow, we put the network to the test.

We placed one of our newly-acquired Rain Mobile SIMs in a Huawei B618 LTE-A router, connected it via an Ethernet cable to a Windows 10 laptop, and lined up the downloads.

Before we started the downloads, multiple speeds tests were conducted using the router. The average results reported by the MyBroadband Speed Test platform were:

  • Download – 22Mbps
  • Upload – 5Mbps
  • Latency – 20ms

The on-router signal strength monitor also showed full signal – 3/3 bars – while the Huawei router’s browser-accessed interface showed a “4G” connection which fluctuated between 4/5 and 5/5 signal bars.

Our download test then started on 26 June 2018 at 06:45, and was run until 06:45 on 27 June.

To test the data throughput, we queued multiple legal BitTorrent files which were well seeded. These included many Ubuntu desktop and servicer ISO files and open academic papers and reports.

A Chrome browser window was also left open running long YouTube videos set at 1440p, playing at the same time as the torrents to ensure maximum bandwidth was used.

In 24 hours on Rain Mobile, we managed:

  • Downloaded – 144.15GB
  • Uploaded – 5.09GB

Interesting notes

It is interesting to note that during our tests, our BitTorrent client consistently showed download speeds of between 2MB/s to 3MB/s (16Mbps to 24Mbps).

However, just after 18:00, the client’s total download throughput dropped from around 3MB/s to under 150KB/s – despite all the torrents being well seeded.

Separate tests conducted by MyBroadband staff members showed similar results.

On 25 June, torrent download speeds via the same Rain Mobile SIM dropped off drastically after 17:00.

Tests on a separate Rain Mobile SIM on 26 June showed a similar performance when it came to Steam downloads.

A MyBroadband staff member reported they were hitting 40Mbps download speeds when using the Steam client and their Rain Mobile SIM to download games this week.

At 18:00, these download speeds dropped to between 150kbps-400kbps, and then returned to 40Mbps just after 23:00.


Rain test set-up

Our Rain test set-up is shown below.

Rain Test


Now read: Vodacom vs MTN – Netflix data usage

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