Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Thursday 2 July 2009, 8:05 AM
WiFi vs. Mobile Broadband (HSPA)
I have to say first that I am mildly surprised to be writing this. I'm sitting in Starbucks, where I came to spend an hour drinking coffee and using their public WiFi access before going to an appointment (nope, no job yet...). I got my Fujitsu S6510 connected with no problem... and then waited, and waited, and waited. Now, admittedly, this is an obviously poorly equiped, configured and managed access point, but it is also a well known one and frequently suggested one. At the speed it was going, I doubt that I could have fully loaded 6 pages in an hour, and the majority of them just gave up and timed out after a while.
In disgust, I gave up, disconnecdted from the WiFi, and put in my Swisscom (Option) HSPA Express Card. This is on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, running Ubuntu 9.04. I had never put the HSPA card in since fresh loading 9.04, so it went through the new Mobile Broadband device setup, which took less than a minute. I clicked Connect, and in less than another minute, it was connected and zooming along at a very nice speed. A quick speed check says I am getting 2.5 Mbps down and 250Kbps up, which is plenty for me.
The moral of the story is, it is no longer valid to assume, as I did, that WiFi will be faster and more reliable than Mobile Broadband; more importantly, consider your costs and the kind of mobile internet plan you have. Mine is a fixed-cost-per-day-used plan. The cost for a full day of unlimited use is less than the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee. I sure wish I had thought of that about an hour ago!
jw 2/7/2009
In disgust, I gave up, disconnecdted from the WiFi, and put in my Swisscom (Option) HSPA Express Card. This is on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, running Ubuntu 9.04. I had never put the HSPA card in since fresh loading 9.04, so it went through the new Mobile Broadband device setup, which took less than a minute. I clicked Connect, and in less than another minute, it was connected and zooming along at a very nice speed. A quick speed check says I am getting 2.5 Mbps down and 250Kbps up, which is plenty for me.
The moral of the story is, it is no longer valid to assume, as I did, that WiFi will be faster and more reliable than Mobile Broadband; more importantly, consider your costs and the kind of mobile internet plan you have. Mine is a fixed-cost-per-day-used plan. The cost for a full day of unlimited use is less than the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee. I sure wish I had thought of that about an hour ago!
jw 2/7/2009
PreviousComments on this post
The only reason I switch to WiFi on my G1 is if I'm roaming and can't even contemplate using 3G. I noticed that things weren't really much faster than 3G, I'm on a tariff where there's no real danger of incurring extra costs from. so the extra battery drain of running two radios seems hardly worth it.
This may change as phone processors get faster, and the bottleneck moves back to the network, but with so much 'free' or commercially provided Wi-Fi being as slow as a legless dog in molasses I doubt the future's going to be much different.
