Test 6: Mobile broadband speed and latency testing

We used the speedtest.net service to measure real throughput speeds on all the services, as well as ping time — the time it takes for a request to be sent to a remote server and for a response to be received. Ping time is important for VoIP, gaming, and can even affect the speed of web browsing if pages have many elements in them (which most do these days). Any thing around 200ms (a fifth of a second) is tolerable. Mobile networks traditionally have very poor ping times, but HSPA technology has improved latency a lot. Here’s how our test networks performed — note Optus/Virgin’s horrendous ping time, near one second.