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Fuzzy Logic Telstra never hosed up 21Mbps actual speeds, promotes eHSPA anyway
Fuzzy Logic Telstra never hosed up 21Mbps actual speeds, promotes eHSPA anyway | Telstra never hosed up 21Mbps actual speeds, promotes eHSPA anyway |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 07 October 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 The claims of network speeds are claims around what the network is simply what the equipment manufacturers rate the technology as, “real world” speeds have always been the important factor, and while the headline speeds are in the headline, the real world speeds are always there in fine print. Featured Whitepaper
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It’s the same with kilobits and kilobytes – a 3Mbps or 3000Kbps (kilobits) connection sounds a lot better than a 375KBps (kilobytes). Even the old 56Kbps modem sounded a lot better than 7KB modem, although because we started off with 300baud (bits) modems, it’s not surprising that as speeds increased, vendors decided to go with a figure that sounds larger than it would otherwise. I.e. Kilobits over kilobytes, the same happens today with megabits over megabytes - at least when it comes to network speeds A similar issue exists with hard drives. Although these have always been counted in bytes, not bits, the unformatted capacity of a hard drive is always larger than the formatted capacity – and I don’t see any action to force hard disk manufacturers to promote the formatted capacity of their drives over the formatted capacity. In the “old days” when sizes were small, this didn’t matter, but today you can lose gigabytes of capacity between an unformatted and a formatted drive. So, unless you’re completely new to the game, “everyone” knows that advertised “peak” speeds of the network are never what you’ll get in real life - and if you don't know, you quickly find out. As always, there’s the explanation in the fine print, with Telstra’s careful to note in its press release (and its website, packaging and elsewhere): “Note: Speeds represented are network peak downlink speeds. Actual customer download speeds will be less and will vary due to congestion, distance from the cell, local conditions, hardware, software and other factors.” And the future awaits still - with LTE touted as the upgrade path to go beyond eHSPA/HSPA+ with lower latency, the same network speed at the edge of the network that is possible at the centre and faster speeds still, along with the hope that "peak" speeds and "real world" speeds finally start getting closer. |
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