Which mobile network has the fastest mobile broadband:
Optus, Telstra, 3, Vodafone or Virgin Broadband?
In the October 2008 edition of APC, we've looked at which mobile network is fastest. You can read our full analysis in the magazine, but below are the videos of the actual speed tests we ran. You'll be amazed at the performance difference between the networks.
See for yourself
One of the most common things you’d do on wireless broadband while filling in time? Check the homepage of your city’s major newspaper. Since we were testing in Sydney, we loaded the Sydney Morning Herald homepage on each network and timed how long it took for the basic content to appear, as well as for the full page to load. Differences were staggering!
Another major web site you might visit in your wireless broadband travels is Microsoft.com. We loaded the homepage and timed how long it took on each network.
Why Lonely Planet’s home page, you ask? Fair question. It’s because Steve Jobs used it to demonstrate the speed of the iPhone 3G compared to the original iPhone. We figured it would be an interesting test to run on each mobile broadband service for comparison. Vodafone, Three and Virgin were the dog performers here: the first time we tried to load LonelyPlanet.com, the request never completed, with the page getting stuck half way. On a repeated attempt the page was sluggish to display images.
National broadcaster ABC now offers full-screen TV on demand through its new ‘iView’ service — another good reason to have broadband. The service requires 1.1Mbit/s, which theoretically should work with all of these wireless broadband services. But does it? We used the ABC’s streaming TV bandwidth meter to see how these services really performed.
If you can’t watch YouTube on your mobile broadband service, what’s the point of having broadband? Seriously, YouTube sets the bar pretty low for broadband requirements; its videos are encoded at a very low bit rate so they’ll play on most connections. We also tried watching the same video in ‘high quality’ mode: a more bandwidth-intensive mode. What was most noticeable on repeated tests with the Optus network was that the results were unpredictable. Sometimes pages would load incompletely or with incorrect styling, probably indicating packetloss (see our video of trying to watch YouTube on Optus!)
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.
The full report is in the October edition of APC Magazine.