[Ben]

Well, as per usual there has been controversy lately around these parts about certain providers of mobile broadband and the usability of the service provided. So, here's an update on Vodafone 3G in my little village of Chestfield in the South East of England.

Ping results:
--- bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
21 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 148.525/167.617/177.602/6.412 ms

--- google.co.uk ping statistics ---
21 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 169.653/179.265/195.143/5.644 ms

Current connected time: 11h 37m

I'm quite impressed... it's browsing 'like' wired broadband, which is quite a difference from the last time I checked how Vodafone 3G Broadband was performing in my area.

Btw, you can ignore "ISP" on the speedtest, I'm VPN'd, so not using a Vodafone IP.

[Hands0n]

I think similar results from North Kent, I am within eyesight of the nearest Vodafone 3G mast. The speedtest results are always a bit truncated for the download, but you can see that I am on HSPA due to the 350kbps upload speed.


bbc.co.uk
Ping statistics for 212.58.224.138:
Packets: Sent = 21, Received = 21, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 233ms, Maximum = 626ms, Average = 294ms

google.co.uk
Ping statistics for 66.249.93.104:
Packets: Sent = 21, Received = 21, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 330ms, Maximum = 546ms, Average = 404ms

http://www.speedtest.net/result/344888010.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

[Ben]

Oo, good comparison. Yes, being on the VPN seems to allow for a full speedtest to happen. You might want to google "bbmax" and see if that works any better on vanilla Voda. Damn proxies and wotnot!

Even your pings there are miles better than most mobile broadband on the market.

[illusions]

I must be one of the unlucky ones i went to the speed test site as they did above bu my connection was too slow to even make the page load.

I did however manage to fins a gif image speed test download and it reported my speed as LESS than 56k I currently have the E220 3.6mb download speed and have never reached more than 128k. post a screenshot of the test speed.. they were taken at 3:15am this morning which should have been a decent speed at that time of morning.. I tried to download an older version of my Driver and found it was 17mb and that it would take (wait for it) 2 days 5 hours and 36 minutes to complete..

[Hands0n]

@illusions - Hi there, welcome to Talk3G.

Those are very low speed results indeed and, like you say, at 3am in the morning I would have thought that you were not competing for local connection bandwidth with the Vodafone transmitter mast. There may be other factors however.

Have you been able to speedtest at a number of different locations? I have seen close to 5Mbps in central London (where Voda say the max speed is 7.2Mbps). But during a normal working day that often drops to the levels that you are seeing.

One thing with speedtest sites is that, for some reason I'm not entirely sure of, these do not give very good results anyway. The true acid test is to download a file of a known size and watch the download stats to see where they peak at. I've never seen a speedtest site result higher than what I have shown above. But to be sure, anything about 384Kbps is in the realm of HSPA.

[Ben]

Hi illusions, welcome to Talk3G!

I hate to ask :D But your dongle was definitely on 3G and not GSM when those tests were done, right? Those results are bad. It'd be worth doing the ping tests too, though, to see what your latency is like.

[illusions]

@illusions - Hi there, welcome to Talk3G.

Those are very low speed results indeed and, like you say, at 3am in the morning I would have thought that you were not competing for local connection bandwidth with the Vodafone transmitter mast. There may be other factors however.

Have you been able to speedtest at a number of different locations? I have seen close to 5Mbps in central London (where Voda say the max speed is 7.2Mbps). But during a normal working day that often drops to the levels that you are seeing.

One thing with speedtest sites is that, for some reason I'm not entirely sure of, these do not give very good results anyway. The true acid test is to download a file of a known size and watch the download stats to see where they peak at. I've never seen a speedtest site result higher than what I have shown above. But to be sure, anything about 384Kbps is in the realm of HSPA.

and


Hi illusions, welcome to Talk3G!

I hate to ask But your dongle was definitely on 3G and not GSM when those tests were done, right? Those results are bad. It'd be worth doing the ping tests too, though, to see what your latency is like.


Im in Lowestoft Suffolk and was told by the shop that the speed of 3.6mb was quite common around this area so indeed i signed up i took out the 18 month contract at £15.00 had great speed for that first day but unfortunatley that was near 5 months ago and i havent been able to get that speed again.

Things i noticed that started to happen.

1 = I couldnt load more than 3 pages or the webpage would just keep saying Loading ni an endless loop. And i would have to disconnect the Dongle and Restart it.

2 = The dongle Reports im uploading at 3kbps and Received of around 45kbps. However it still took around 45 seconds just to load the google page.

3 = I am Constantly having to Unplug the USB and reset the whole thing as it just Crashes so bad. Once its reinserted its fnie for about 5 minutes then im back to square one again..

4 = I cleared out my Temp Cache thiking it was that. and Obviously with the vodafone giving out 3GIG of space im using this up quite fast having to empty the entire cache all the time..

In response to BEN yeah its on 3G nice blue iluminated light when its connected is mentions that its connected at 3.6mb.
I did how ever test the 2G to make sure all though the signal meter went way up and i thought i'd cracked it the session was even slower than before so i put it back to 3G mode..

PS

Just thought id also mention the Dongle is on my tower

[Hands0n]

There are two blue indicator colours - the deeper of the two blues is bog standard 3G which is 384/64 asymetric. The turquoise is HSPA which is the "up to" 7.2Mbps, entirely dependent upon any number of factors. Outside of London 3.2Mbps is the max at the moment.

If you're having to empty the browser cache all of the time it really does not sound very much like the USB dongle itself. More like something odd going on in the browser itself. You'll need to do some diagnosis to find out what that may be.

Is it IE7 (or even IE6)? Do you have any Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) loaded? These are infamous for causing browser performance issues, disable all of them and - if you really want/need them - switch them on one at a time between tests until the fault comes back (assuming it goes away when you disable all BHOs).

You could have a TCP fault in XP itself - check out this little tool to fix the LCP http://www.xp-smoker.com/freeware.html

Ahead of that you should pop open a Command window and set up a long ping to a reliable network address - finish the ping by CTRL/C and see what it reports. In Windows the command is ping -t google.co.uk That should do nicely.

Vodafone have experienced DNS problems - you could try setting your TCP/IP settings for DNS manually and make use of OpenDNS. See --> https://www.opendns.com/homenetwork/start/

The crashes you report are rarely going to be because of a modem or other communications device. Rather it is more likely that your PC is not handling the TCP/IP communications very well. It al smacks of the TCP/IP stack being corrupted in some way.

It would be useful [to you] to check out the USB stick on another computer also, perhaps a friend's or a PC at work if your IT department will let you. If the fault carries over with the USB stick then it is indeed the stick that is faulty and needs to be replaced under warranty with Vodafone.

There are several things you can try above, not in any particular order. I'd go with the LCP fix first, and then work through the others in turn.

[illusions]

Cheers Ben :)

After reading your post i downloaded the LCP whilst it was downloading i took a screen shop of the file downloading with the VLC in the background the image was taken after a refreshed connection of VMC and as you can see by the results you can understand why im so annoyed at the performance..

However after installing the LPC things seem to have picked up slightly I'll probably know more in a few minutes/hours as thats when it goes mental

Kind regards

Roy..

[miffed]

Blimey - I thought I had problems with Three's service !

I agree with the comments above - try it on another PC (if you can) and failing that get it back to the shop ASAP !! even if they only try the modem and show you it working properly , and least you can then eliminate a faulty modem from your enquiries - My suspicion is that the modem/sim is faulty and they'll replace it for you

Funnily enough, earlier in the year we had a promotion team in at work for 6 weeks , they had been given a Vodafone e220 by their IT management company , and their results were similar to yours ( I ended up letting them share my T-mobile connection for the little access they needed ) - We never saw a resolve to this , as the modem belonged to an IT company based hundreds of mile away , and they assumed the girls were using it wrongly !