Apparently, AT&T has some advancements planned for its networks that will raise the top speed of their 3G network to 20 megabits/second. Right now it’s at about 3.6Mbit, so that’s quite a jump. They’re being coy about the actual changes, which makes me suspicious. They’re already doubling the speed with a software update, they say, and the big jump to 20Mbit will require no major infrastructure changes. It’s almost as if they’ve been capable of high speed all this time and have simply been throttling it. That would just be evil, but more importantly it wouldn’t be profitable, so we can assume it’s not the case.
The 20Mbit 3G network will serve as a stopgap until the planned 2010 move to 700MHz 4G. And meanwhile my little T-Mo Trace takes 30 seconds to load Google in its little microbrowser.
that will be faster than my actual broadband, i just wish that the council/phone company gives me fiber optics soon
I’m betting that it’s a back-haul issue. Your link to the tower is irrelevant mostly. Once you establish your high speed connection to the tower, what’s piping the data back to the web? A fractional T1? A T3? Before you answer, don’t forget that you’re sharing that bandwidth with everyone else that’s pushing packets in that cell.
Prediction: AT&T will drop OC-12’s into all cell towers and wipe out copper once and for all. Death to copper! 4G vs. Fiber will be the new battle for our hearts, minds, and wallets.
Can somebody come and talk to my ISP? Their idea of fast DSL is 10 Mb/s, and that’s only in select areas, we don’t even manage 1Mb/s in real world speed.