Living near Philadelphia, I often miss out on the newest tech happenings in places like San Francisco. But I’ve bided my time and now I finally get to try out new tech before Silicon Valley. T-Mobile is in the process of upgrading their 3G network to offer 7.2 Mbps HSPA speeds and they asked me if I wanted to take it for a test drive. To say that my reaction time was faster than the latency of my home FiOS connection would be an understatement– absolutely, I said! I just received their webConnect USB adapter (shown below), so on my next out-and-about work session, I’ll be driving from the farms to the city to give this a run though.
My expectation is to use the connection for my typical work habits of browsing the web, responding to email and creating content. But I know that 3G customers do far more than that, so I’ll watch some streaming video, move some large files around and get a general feel for the bandwidth and latency of the connection. I realize that our readers outside of the U.S. are probably wondering what the big deal is — after all, some of them have had wireless connections of 7.2 Mbps or faster for some time now. Putting this in perspective for you folks — no U.S. carrier is offering theoretical speeds faster than 3.6 Mbps at the moment. Exciting for us… you, not so much. ;)
T-Mobile is working on the network upgrades now on a nationwide basis and currently offers 170 million POPs for 3G access. The expectation is that the 7.2 Mbps upgrade will be readily available by the end of this year. Why the rush? T-Mo is already planning to move towards HSPA+ with theoretical speeds of 21 Mbps in 2010, which is far more aggressive that AT&T’s known plans and competes well with Verizon’s move towards LTE next year. The best part of the current T-Mobile upgrade is that most of the devices they’ve launched in 2009 are already capable of using the faster 7.2 Mpbs network. Based on a call I had with the company, devices like the Cliq, MyTouch, Touch Pro 2, Dash 3G and even the year-old G1 should enjoy faster speeds once the network upgrades are competed.
I’ll have an update on my experience with the tests and will try to get some video of the experience. Since I have a Verizon 3G adapter, I’ll see if can get a side-by-side comparsion too.
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