Telstra's Next G wireless Internet rocks - except when it doesn't

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 15 March 2008 08:53

Opinion and Analysis

I had a look through the options of the Next G connection software I’m using (it’s the Telstra version, not the BigPond version that I have loaded), and I saw that I could change the network the card accesses from the 3.5G network, to the 3G network or the 2G network.

The 3.5G network gives you HSDPA and HSUPA speeds of 500kbps to 5000kbps down and 250 to 1300kbps up, the 3G network network gives you speeds of 500kbps to 1500 kbps down and around 250kbps up, while the 2G network, at EDGE speeds, gives you approximately 100kbps download speeds.

Thinking that the 2G EDGE data network is probably being used by far fewer people than the 3G and 3.5G networks, I told my data card’s software to only look for and connect to Telstra’s 2G EDGE network.

And... everything changed. I can now connect to the Internet, maintain a solid connection, and quickly get some work done. Of course the connection is far slower than any 3G or 3.5G connection, but for the purposes of writing a story and then publishing it into our Joomla-based content management system, EDGE is more than good enough.

Making sure that we keep older networks in place, as long as they don’t cost a fortune to maintain (as Telstra claims is the case with the CDMA network), is a great backup to have.

My choices were simple: either no connection or an extremely flaky connection with Next G, or I could choose to connect to the slower EDGE network and post a story, as I have just done.

So, sometimes the very latest and greatest isn’t always the best solution, even though my normal preference would always be for 3G and 3.5G over 2G.

But, in this case, the slow, old 2.5G EDGE network saved the day. When Next G doesn’t rock, EDGE is still a great alternative, with any reliable connection clearly better than a flaky connection or no connection at all.

Disclosure: Alex Zaharov-Reutt attended the Saturday qualifying round of the F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne as a guest of Sensis.