Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

For those that have taken advantage of the tumbling subscription rates for mobile broadband through the likes of 3, T-Mobile etc (as cheap as £5 per month), the different data rates might prove a little confusing. Paul Ockenden has a useful article in PCPro this month that summarises and gives a little history on the topic. And the main data rates you will come across are:

CSD: 14.4 Kb/s
GPRS: 114 Kb/s
EDGE: 230 Kb/s
3G: 384 Kb/s
HSDPA: 1.8, 3.6 or 7.2 Mb/s

The interesting thing here is that 3G only ever vaguely approached the slowest ADSL line speeds (51Kb/s) and we certainly wouldn’t consider it fast today. And also note how fast EDGE is to 3G. However it is HSDPA that is really pushing the envelope and the data rates can get this fast (depending upon the contention). Note that 3G/HSDPA are separate from the other standards which run on standard GSM. 3G technologies are at different frequencies and on a different network. Interestingly both EDGE and HSDPA can supposedly be deployed using firmware upgrades to existing equipment.