May 24th, 2010Rogers 21.6Mbs HSPA+ is very very fast
St Catherines On, May 23 2010 (fastest of 1 test run):
Toronto On, May 24 2010 (fastest of 3 test runs):
Slowest of 3 Toronto test runs (all in the space of 10min): 4.5Mbit down, 0.68Mbit up
Tested with Rogers ZTE MF668 HSPA “21″ Mbps HSPA+ stick
That first test at an amazing 13Mb/s down and 1.22Mb/s is significantly faster than most people’s wired connectivity (at least in bandwidth if not quite latency). If you were doubting if there was any effective difference between standard 7.2Mb HSPA and the 21.6Mb HSPA+ variety, here is your proof. You will see these speeds only with a rocket stick, tethering is always going to be limited to some fraction of 7.2MBs which is currently the fasted rated speed of any handset in Canada.
For best results, it seems to help a little if you test the network in beautiful weather on a statutory holiday. It may also help if you test it in a municipality like St Catharines On, where you could well be the only one for miles around actually hitting any local cell tower for it’s full available bandwidth. Wirelessnorth has been playing with this particular rocketstick for several months now, but these are the fastest speeds we’ve ever seen.
One more thing, unlike Rogers cable, Bittorrent on HSPA+ is very fast and unthrottled.
>800 KBytes/sec (!) And we thought 250 was impressive just a few years ago. At this speed you could blow through your 6GByte monthly cap in about 2 hours and fifteen minutes.
To put all this in perspective, just three years ago, the fastest devices on the rogers network were still stuck on EDGE, good for little better than dial-up modem equivalent speeds.
PS: If anyone has comparable (or better) results for the Wind mobile or Bell/Telus HSPA+ network let us know if you can beat these scores.
