3UK: rolling out super-super-fast HSDPA and HSUPA
By Ben Robinson on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 12:19 PM PST In Infrastructure, Three
3UK has announced that it is planning to have 14.4Mbps speeds rolled out across the UK by 2010. Currently it has 3.6Mbps rolled out to 95% of the population, and the intermediate step of 7.2Mbps will come sometime between now and 2010, depending on where you live.
Of course, the thing with these numbers is that they are largely coverage/user dependent – if you don’t got good coverage, or you are in a busy cell, I shouldn’t expect anything like these numbers. In fact, reading some of the comments from 3 Mobile Broadband users, they seem to suggest that the uplink rates (which are usually less than downlink, but should still be respectable) are actually throttled to a very low number- which isn’t really what the messaging of this announcement is trying to convey.
Right now there seems to be a bit of a backlash against any sort of advertised ‘possible speeds’, and also toward the ‘unlimited usage’ policies that always have a caveat of ‘within fair use limits!’ in small print.
Overall, I think there might have to be a paradigm shift soon where Operators focus on quality – both in the sense of network capacity, but also of customer care – rather than the maximum theoretical speeds of a given service
[Via: The Register]
3 need to start delivering on the speeds they currently promise before making
outlandish promises like this. I live in London E6, near City Airport and cannot
even access google, let alone anything else. To make matters worse tehy advertise
perfect coverage in my area and won’t allow me cancel my contract, which I believe
infringes my consumer rights. Their customer service is dire and they charge you
for for the priveledge of getting hung up on constantly and told they can’t do
anything or that there’ll be a mast installed in 2011. My advice to everybody is
avoid 3 at all costs.