My experiments with the truth (about 3G)

As you will have read before (how presumptuous of me to think anyone reads this drivel), I recently got a Tata DoCoMo pre paid connection to test both their network and their 3G performance claims. This was driven mainly by my frustrations with the Airtel network and the number of call drops I was experiencing.

So for the last couple of days I was using predominantly my DoCoMo connection to make calls and browse the network. The first day, the performance looked pretty good. Not blazingly fast, mind you, but fast enough. I downloaded the speedtest app for the iPhone to see what speeds I was getting. The very first evening, I got a 2.1Mbps download speed and a 512k upload. That looked nice enough. But a day later, those numbers had dropped to 1.1Mbps and 127k. Still respectable, but a marked drop from the earlier state.

Here's the problem tho. Speed tests are fine as they are, but the real test is in loading times of pages that I frequent. One such page is the Google News Sports page (UK edition) so that I can catch up with the latest in the world of the Barkleys Premier League. For the last couple of days, the time it takes to load that page is almost the same as my Airtel connection on Edge. Not the best selling point for 3G.

Forget being able to make voice calls and watch streaming videos, I was having problems with basic browsing at an acceptable speed. Very disappointing, I must say. I tried only once to load a Youtube video over 3G and the amount of time it was taking to buffer the video turned me off and I gave up pretty quickly. Now this is not an indictment of the 3G technology, cause I have seen people in Seoul watch live TV being streamed to their cell phones. So I know the technology works. Just the the 3G service of DoCoMo sucks! So does their cell reception. I can't catch a signal in our office basement (and I can with Airtel). So overall it has been a disappointing trail. Oh well, I will just have to move to some other provider after my prepaid amount runs out.