3G Speed Tests: What to Expect?

Finally, we give you the performance results of the real test of 3G service providers: the 3G speeds. The test was performed at full signal strength for various service providers in the vicinity of our office locations in two cities, Gurgaon and Mumbai, on the same day. We got two identical mobile phones: HTC Desire HD (Android OS) and Nokia E72 (Symbian OS), in each city. The test was performed across different time frames throughout the day: morning, afternoon and evening. The good news is that though the speed can vary by region, time of the day, etc, it's considerably faster than what 2G had to offer. So users can at least have a decent experience on the Internet.

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For Android-based HTC Desire, we downloaded and installed the mobile app for Speedtest.net from the Android market (https://market. android.com). In this test, random binary data is downloaded and uploaded and hence, we get individual results for each transfer. Since, the application is not compatible with Symbian mobile, we went for another speed test from Broadband DSLReports. com (http://www. dslreports.com/ speedtest). In this test, a transfer of random binary data occurs in both directions and we get a single consolidated result. The test is performed in stages, it starts with small transfers and moves to larger ones until a minimum amount of time has passed during the transfer to provide a good measure. In the table we show what we experienced as far as 3G speeds in these two cities is concerned.