Smartone-Vodafone HSDPA Network Test Results

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As most readers know I conducted a joint test of Smartone-Vodafone’s HSDPA network last week; which I now found out it cost me HKD60.00 in data charges, as I had detailed in my post, Smartone-Vodafone HSDPA Network Speed Tested.

At the time Smartone-Vodafone technicians did not have the data correlated until today.

These results are from running the SpeedTest iPhone application on each of the iPhones used in the test.

These two data chart were provided by Smartone-Vodafone, so it has the tendency to show Smartone-Vodafone network as the faster network.

I would not have averaged out the speeds of the test on site by site bases, as we are talking about different locations on Hong Kong island at different time of the day. The better way to look at these data is to average out the browsing speed on a per site, per location bases. Below is the chart showing the speed in number of seconds to completely load the respective web page.

As you can see from the chart above. It is not that web browsing speed of the iPhone 3GS on the Smartone-Vodafone network is always faster than the iPhone 3GS on the 3 HK network. The important thing is that the browsing speed is much more consistent for the iPhone 3GS on the Smartone-Vodafone network.

Having a consistent speed is much more important than having a fast downlink or uplink. I hope that this will provide consumers in Hong Kong a close to real life comparison of the two mobile carriers’ 3G networks.

Tagged as: 3 HK, 3.0.1, 3.1, 3G network, HSDPA, iPhone 3GS, Smartone-Vodafone

Bilou
Erm, quite recently, maybe 2 months ago, SMV changed the routing of their home page. Until then they used to use a file download from it (89 Mbyte) as a test. Now that the page is routed more or less directly to the mast, that test is useless. I mentioned that to their tech support who were unaware of the change. They changed their testing method accordingly and now use an external site. Not sure which one.

If the test is to ascertain if your mast to mobile connection is good then it is valid. But you can't compare between 3 and SMV by loading their respective homepages. Better to test SMV to 3s page and vice versa, then adjust for the difference in page size.

My load times for 3's page http://www.three.com.hk from SMV are about 4 seconds (for about 278kb) after emptying the browser cache manually). I keep my cache on a 100 Mbyte ramdisk which is very fast. A hard disk would be a lot slower. On relaod with the cache already loaded up, it does it in less than 2 seconds. very difficult to measure accurately The browser is Opera 9.64. There are however a lot of non-network related factors in there: The browser render rate, the server latency, connection inital latency (maybe 900ms to get a connection set up through the router, then it drops to 50 - 70 ms for on-going downloads on the same browser connection (s). Browser is set to a max of 8 connexions to any one server and 64 to all servers combined. Thats a variable as well.
Vinko
Thank you for sharing your results. The results described in this post was only testing the iPhone on the SMV 3G network as compared to the 3 HK 3G network.

In either case it is best to restrict the destination web site to ones in Hong Kong, or when using SpeedTest iPhone application or web site, one should limit to testing traffic between the device and a Hong Kong server.

Testing access to any servers outside of Hong Kong involves way too many additional variables to confidently blame SMV for the poor perforance.
vlcchan
anyone with CSL mobile network? it would be nice to also compare CSL with smartone and 3