{"id":14947,"date":"2010-09-05T20:11:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T18:11:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-09-05T20:11:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-05T18:11:00","slug":"cell-c-21-mbps-hspa-tested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/broadband\/14947-cell-c-21-mbps-hspa-tested.html","title":{"rendered":"Cell C 21 Mbps HSPA+ tested"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cell C officially switched on its so-called “4Gs” HSPA+ network in Port Elizabeth last week.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The real test, however, was when we were given E1820 modems to test in our own computers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Speed tests to international servers told a different story, however.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Destination (Host) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nDownlink (Mbps) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nUplink (Mbps) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nLatency\/Ping (ms<\/span><\/strong>)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Johannesburg (Cell C)<\/td>\n13.10<\/td>\n1.30<\/td>\n86<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
London (Namesco)<\/td>\n4.81<\/td>\n0.33<\/td>\n364<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
New York (Optimum Online)<\/td>\n4.01<\/td>\n0.17<\/td>\n457<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cape Town (Vodacom)<\/td>\n3.31<\/td>\n0.67<\/td>\n139<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
San Francisco (Unwired)<\/td>\n2.96<\/td>\n0.21<\/td>\n517<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Washington (Speedtest.net)<\/td>\n2.67<\/td>\n0.22<\/td>\n468<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Upon returning to Gauteng it turned out that the modem still connected to a 3G network.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Destination (Host) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nDownlink (Mbps) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nUplink (Mbps) <\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nLatency\/Ping (ms)<\/span><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Johannesburg (Cell C)<\/td>\n2.47 – 4.65<\/td>\n0.35 – 0.40<\/td>\n60 – 78<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
London (Namesco)<\/td>\n2.36 – 3.52<\/td>\n0.28 – 0.33<\/td>\n334 – 354<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
New York (Optimum Online)<\/td>\n1.97 – 3.12<\/td>\n0.08 – 0.15<\/td>\n411 – 445<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cape Town (Vodacom)<\/td>\n1.82 – 3.90<\/td>\n0.30 – 0.53<\/td>\n95 – 121<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
San Francisco (Unwired)<\/td>\n1.80 – 3.66<\/td>\n0.08 – 0.17<\/td>\n477 – 500<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Washington (Speedtest.net)<\/td>\n2.02 – 3.05<\/td>\n0.12 – 0.22<\/td>\n400 – 429<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Cell C’s 21 Mbps broadband service speeds<\/a><\/strong> << comments and views<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does 21.1 Mbps really mean? We find out when we test Cell C\u2019s new 900 Mhz HSPA+ network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broadband"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}