Vodafone’s high-speed mobile broadband will actually deliver high speeds
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, smartphone, Networking, Mobile on
Three years ago, when WiMAX looked like the best way to get faster mobile data, the then head of Vodafone made a point of stating the obvious at the Mobile World Congress; the networks would rather stick to 3G, the HSPA enhancements and eventually the ‘Long Term Evolution’ standard because evolving your network may be painful, but it’s better than ripping it out and putting in a brand new one, especially when they’d need twice as many base stations to provide the same coverage. But if HSPA and LTE didn’t show signs of showing up and speeding up to match the 100Mbps WiMAX promised in the long term, the convenience wasn’t going to stop the networks abandoning 3G.
3G speeds have been creeping up ever since, from 1 to 3.6 to 7 and now to 14.4Mbps. On the face of it that sounds faster than the average 2Mbps DSL connection in the UK; faster even than the 8Mbps you get on a faster exchange. But there’s a dirty little secret about most mobile broadband connections. It’s not just that the quoted speed is always a theoretical maximum and just as you never get a gigabit of data a second over gigabit Ethernet, you need to take off a quarter to a third from the maximum speed. It’s not just that the actual speed is shared with everyone else using data on the same cell; it’s that the speed quoted and the actual speed delivered are both only the speed to connect to the base station - not the Internet. And a surprising number of 3G base stations connect on to the Internet over 2Mbps DSL (and remember; you’re still sharing that speed with up to 50 other users in the same cell).
Not Vodafone; backhaul matters, says Vodafone CTO Jeni Mundy. “The pipes we put into the cell sites are key for anything you want to do on the Vodafone network or going out to the Internet; the bandwidth of those pipes is critically important and we’re absolutely doing not just a base station upgrade, we’re making sure we put the right backhaul in place to carry that traffic.”
In this case, rather than a single 2Mbps line, each Vodafone base station has eight 2Mbps E1 fibre connections adding up to 16Mbps of bandwidth. That’s courtesy of the deal Vodafone did last spring to connect to BT’s 21 Century Network and it means there’s slightly more than enough backhaul to deal with the incoming connections.
Vodafone’s press release about the launch was far more honest than most discussions of mobile broadband, which often suggest that no-one could tell the difference from DSL. Instead of trumpeting that Vodafone has the first 14.4 network in the UK, it pointed out “whilst 14.4 Mbps is the theoretical peak rate, customers can expect to see typical speeds of anything between 1 and 4 Mbps with a practical maximum speed of 10.8 Mbps.”
Mundy was equally frank about what that actually delivers: “As you improve the speed it works in two ways. If you look at the purest end, you can get up to 10.8Mbps -but in reality, few users get all the bandwidth. Where you have a number of users, we’re able to have those users further away from the cell because we’ve got more capacity. We can either have a broader cell coverage area or a much higher speed for single users, so you get advantages either way and the smarts of our technology will optimise that to maximise the benefit for users at any one time.”
The 14.4 network is live in the “busy areas” of London, Birmingham and Liverpool already; other areas - like London suburbs - will have the faster speeds by next March and Vodafone estimates that 80% of the 3G handsets and dongles that currently connect to their network can use the faster speed. And for once, a faster speed really will give you a faster connection.
-Mary
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