Unleashed by 3G
The old GPRS connection was a bottleneck in getting a piece of the content out there on the internet.
With GPRS, in places with best signal strength, the median downloading speed while downloading large files (greater than 3 MB) must have been in between 25 and 30 kilobytes per second (kbps).
My mobile service provider has recently started 3G service in my hometown (Solapur), and I’m lucky to have bought a 3G phone well in advance. I’ve been using 3G since last couple of weeks while I was in Pune. But I chanced upon test-driving the 3G connection today in Solapur while I was downloading an 8MB video file. Peak speed I observed was 336 kbps. Median speed must be somewhere in between 200 and 300 kbps.
That’s maddeningly fast! It’s for the first time that I’m getting such speeds. 3G has even undermined the broadband connection I used to use 6-7 months back. I used to get speeds of over 200 kbps, up to 260 kbps.
