Wirelessnorth.ca

It seems the Globe and Mail has picked up on our story last week of a slowing Rogers high speed network. We had a a number of helpful contributors write in with speeds. The fastest iPhone 3G speeds reported currently stands at 440 kbps (that’s kilabits per second). With the fastest rogers HSDPA PC cards ringing in at 800 to 900 kbps at best (twice as fast as an iPhone incidentally).

Here are a few more data points we measured ourselves from a few spots across Eastern Canada this past weekend (best speed of 3 test runs reported):

Toronto: 986/340 kbps dowload/upload, latency: 270ms
Quebec City: 260/287 kbps download/upload, latency: 189ms
Halifax Airport, Bridgewater, Lunenburg: no 3G service, latency: infinite

Bridgewater/LeHave on EVDO rev A dongle: 111 kbps, latency: 999ms (consistently laggy off the charts latency)

As measured in Toronto via speedtest.net:

Some thoughts:

1. We now know why the call the east coast is known as “GSM hell”. Bragg Communications, good on you if you can fix wireless out east.

2. Rogers 3G effective 3G bandwidth appears to be (more than) cut in half since just last april and before the iPhone, N95 launch. We would be happy if someone can prove us wrong, but from the same test locations, peak bandwidth has dropped from well over 2Mbs to now less than a 1Mbs (=1000 kbps)

A frustrated Rogers planner a while back told wirelessnorth.ca a story a while back. That try as they might it, it was habitually a beat-your-head against a wall challenge to convince the old-salt network managers to believe data usage would, yes virginia, one day take off. Overwhelming evidence of both ATT’s one year headstart on the iPhone, and Europe’s skyrocketing mobile broadband usage not withstanding. Seems big red is feeling the pain of short sightedness now. And passing the pleasure on to you. Assuming you can connect in the first place.