Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

Well this is some interesting news on a Tuesday afternoon. While Rogers may not be the first to do this, the fact that we will soon be able to use these kinds of speeds is quite amazing.

But lets be realistic for a minute. I am currently running a 7.2Mbps-capable phone, and my tests are returning about 2.4Mbps. When I was using a 3.6Mbps-capable phone, my tests returned 1.2Mbps. So we can make the naive assumption that when Rogers rolls out 21Mpbs, we will “only” be able to effectively use about 7Mpbs of it. Now I mean that is mighty fast, but its only 33% of advertised speed.

On the other hand, how much do we really need it? Most cellphones can’t handle those speeds, I was surprised mine could handle 2.4Mbps. This is mostly going to be noticed by people with data cards and USB modems, and I would question just how useful it is to have such a boost in speed on a laptop, especially when overage charges are quite high. What I would much rather see is improvements in latency (response time), as most packets that go in and out of phones are fairly small, so its the response time that plays the bigger part in effective throughput.

-Nokia FanBoy

Source:
Engadget Mobile (read).