A Tedious And Personal History Of 3G

[livinthailandos]

I'll try to keep this posting short but today on Gizmodo they have a interesting info on 3G keep in mind though its talking mostly about 3G past history and current 3G from usa, what does any of this have to do with thailand, seems many of the things discussed back then, and past marketing advertisements seem to play out here as well. If you have some time take a read

http://gizmodo.com/5618307/a-tedious-and-personal-history-of-3g

A Tedious and Personal History of 3G

interesting notes

a lot of factors control the performance of your cell phone data transmissions, principally:

1. How much spectrum has the carrier licensed in my city, and how much is allocated to this kind of modulation?

2. How many other people am I sharing the local tower with? In other words, how big is my cell, and how many towers has the carrier built or contracted with?

3. How much throughput are my cellmates trying to consume?

4. How much throughput has the carrier built in its back-end network connecting to the tower?

[sulasno]

when I use my phone as a modem to connect, I am getting near to 384Kb as advertised (by the phone)

I would like to get my hands on an Air card to test the 7.2 Mb speed

[nikster]

I think the bottom line is, there just isn't all that much bandwidth available over the air. And the way it works is it's always shared. So if you have a lot of people using internet, speeds go way down.

So 3G isn't great. But the operators were winging it for years because of a very small number of actual users. They had a few data card users in the pre-iPhone era. And the phones, you couldn't really use for internet very much - they had the features in name, but it was just not a compelling user experience so nobody did it. Once the iPhone came along, 2G and 3G networks were suddenly overloaded (in the USA). People were using these phones actively, and a lot. That's when everything broke down.

AT&T carries 10x the amount of data that Verizon does. That says it all.

Thailand will be fine, lots of towers, easy to install new ones, and not that many smart-phone users. So over here, things will continue to work well, I think. We don't even have 3G officially... but it works great in Chiang Mai and other places.

[monty]

I think the bottom line is, there just isn't all that much bandwidth available over the air. And the way it works is it's always shared. So if you have a lot of people using internet, speeds go way down.

So 3G isn't great. But the operators were winging it for years because of a very small number of actual users. They had a few data card users in the pre-iPhone era. And the phones, you couldn't really use for internet very much - they had the features in name, but it was just not a compelling user experience so nobody did it. Once the iPhone came along, 2G and 3G networks were suddenly overloaded (in the USA). People were using these phones actively, and a lot. That's when everything broke down.

AT&T carries 10x the amount of data that Verizon does. That says it all.

Thailand will be fine, lots of towers, easy to install new ones, and not that many smart-phone users. So over here, things will continue to work well, I think. We don't even have 3G officially... but it works great in Chiang Mai and other places.

Totally correct, and one of the main reasons that pretty much everywhere in the West carriers bill their customers by the amount of data used, basically trying to keep needless usage in check.

Thailand always charged it's wireless GPRS/EDGE internet users on a time base (or a fixed amount for unlimited access, both time and data). True EDGE users found out the results of this when they launched a 250 Baht/month totally unlimited package, it virtually totally grinded to a halt!

To keep it working they will have to change this, and for example TOT does it that way in Bangkok for their 3G network, where they have several packages, both pre and post paid, where the amount you pay dictates the amount of data your are allowed to transfer in a month.