Acceptable 3G / tethering performance

[Guest Stevos]

Hi,

I'm just trying to get a handle on what sort of packet loss and network speeds are considered acceptable.

I'm on T Mobile PAYG UK 3G, with full bars and 3G coverage indicated on the status bar of CM6.1 beta0.3.

When hooked up through adb shell and using ping from London to the BBC website, I get an average ping time of 75ms, maximum of about 3 seconds, along with no real packet loss over a few minute range (when the connection is otherwise unused).

When using apps / browsers to download files and browse on the phone I get highly variable download rates (from zero / a few bytes per second up to high tens of kb per second. Also reliability is very poor (trying to download anything over a megabyte or so often results in a failed download, though less often on the market than through HTTP.)

Using barnacle wifi hooked up to a macbook, I get ping packet loss of between 0 and 80% with return times varying up to about 9 seconds per packet when it's "working", and similar low rates of reliability and variable speeds. Clearly there are very serious problems when using this method :P .

I've been away from my main internet connection for a couple of weeks so I've been using it relatively a lot, and have't had the facilities to flash between different ROMs to test whether that's the issue (though I did manage to DL CM beta 0.3 directly on the phone after dozens of failed attempts.)

I haven't used 3G on any other devices before, and haven't used it heavily on this device or measured its performance before,but have noticed intermittent lack of reliability during previous very light use on other ROMs.

Does this tally up with others experience of connectivity, or is this likely to be an issue with a faulty device or ROM problem? I've been considering getting 3G broadband for my GFs place but not so much after actually using 3G for a real connection

Would be grateful if others could post their results and how reliable their connections are with details of their ROMs

cheers,

stevos

[Guest jaydeeuk1]

I use barnacle w/ t mobile sim to watch sky player. Sky movies/sports etc works perfectly on 'low' and the odd buffering in medium. From memory ping was near 200 but download was excellent.

Thats better than my o2 access broadband at home!

I'm using 2.1 with flb 1.6

Edited October 25, 2010 by jaydeeuk1