Comments on: 3G speeds: better on some devices than others?

By: Scotty

Scotty — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:56:04 +0000

I tried a Verizon EVDO PCMCIA card in a Motion M1300 and in a Motion LE1600 several years ago. It was a disaster in the M1300, didn’t work at all. In the LE1600 I got 1 bar and barely any bandwidth. As you probably know, both designs have the PCMCIA slot in the same place, are the same size etc… my LE1700 rocks with my Express Card HSPA in a PCMCIA adaptor.

Not apples to apples but the fact the LE1700 was designed with a built in HSPA capability (that they cripple in the BIOS so you can’t add the card yourself !@#$) might have led to them tightening things up even more…

If anyone knows how to beat the Motion HSPA BIOS lock I’d love a link… I’ve got the DELL version of the card in my XU870 but the Motion BIOS keeps turning the card off during boot up. I’ve written Motion to find out what cards they do support and they never even respond.

By: bluemonq

bluemonq — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:15:48 +0000

What about antenna layout? I'd imagine that the antenna in the X301 is a lot larger than in your USB dongle simply because there's more room for it.

By: Travis

Travis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:14:20 +0000

Vista does the optimizations but for XP the user must do the tweaking.

What is Cellco Partnership?

By: mark

mark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:45:43 +0000

I consistently get better network speeds from my Tilt than I do the iPhone. If I find myself in need of a network for the laptop and I have the choice of tethering one or the other, it's going to be the Tilt.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:45:22 +0000

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:34:59 +0000

Actually, I'd be more interested in checking out what optimizations were made (if any) to this X301. If none, I wonder if the speeds could be tweaked a wee bit higher yet. Considering the device has embedded WiMAX, it wouldn't surprise me if it was already fully optimized, but you never know.

By: GoodThings2Life

GoodThings2Life — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:31:01 +0000

The short answer is: Yes, absolutely. Performance is definitely going to vary from device to device, configuration to configuration.

Do a search for “TCP Optimizer” on your Windows systems and see if you can’t use it to tweak your settings a bit on the slower systems.

By: ignar

ignar — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:30:56 +0000

System performance and optimization should factor in. I have noticed significant speed difference between Palm Centro and HTC Mogul using the same Sprint EV-DO connection. (Mogul was way faster) So I suppose hardware should have an impact on speed at least up to certain point.

By: Cody B

Cody B — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:17:59 +0000

I think the network interface is getting a constant speed as long as it’s getting power. I do suppose the different devices have different USB controllers. One controller might be more efficient than others. The speed test is how fast the OS gets the file not the hardware. Again it’s just a guess. I’m interested in the results of your test.