Posted: 16th Jan, 2008 By: MarkJ
TR's hardware website has taken Vodafone UK's new 'up to' 7.2Mbps (downstream) capable USB '
Mobile Broadband' (3G) modem for a spin and found it to be pretty good, if not perfect:
Connected, we downloaded a 7MB file from our web server to gauge performance. We downloaded it six times, downloading the next copy after the previous one was completed. The file took, on average, 91.75s to download: an mean data transfer rate of 620.53Kb/s - a far cry from the 7.2Mb/s the modem is capable of. Peak speeds, however, hit upwards of 1.86Mb/s. Even Vodafone admits you'll only get "typical" speeds of 1.7-5.5Mb/s, so we were just inside that range.
Typically you can't expect the top speeds from any broadband service and certainly not one using a mobile phone network, but it's still a reasonable result given the early state of such products. The full review can be read
here.