MobileOne LTE (4G) puts to the test [HD]
Harold 3 Mar 2010

The performance test

Various tests were performance on the two notebooks attached with a LG LTE CAT 3 modem. As we have mentioned before, a CAT 3 modem is capable of 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink.

The first test was a live stream from channelnewsasia website. The video pops up immediately without buffering and streaming was stable and there are no lags at all. Next we tested a 25Mbps HD 1080p video stream from wildlifeHD.com. The performance meter shows a constant bandwidth of 25Mbps throughout the playback.

Next a 167MB Quicktime HD trailer is tested, it downloads off apple website at around 60Mbps-70Mbps and we can see it buffer way ahead of the playback. Another test done was downloading a local file and it was able to reach around 90-94 Mbps on the average.

Next is Speed test and it is able to get 70Mbps downlink and 20Mbps uplink. Another try give us 87Mbps down and 18Mbps up. This is definitely way better than what you could get from a HSPA+ connection. We check out the latency too and it is around 20-30ms.

As we are testing in an perfect environment with only 2 clients login, we wanted to know what would be the effect if there are multiple users logging on at the same time.

According to Patrick, users might be using Cat 3 or 4 or 5 and multiple users logging in at different times, there will be different experiences. There are many different factors like signal strength, number of users, bandwidth which might affect it.

M1's chief technical officer Patrick Scodeller said the company will start installing base stations in about 1,400 locations across the island some time in October this year and be completed by Q1 2011. Hopefully, we can see a commercial launch somewhere not later than Q2 2011.

Conclusion

We were pleased with the performance of LTE. It is exceptionally fast for mobile users, especially those that require high speed data transfer of video files.

As we only have 2 clients connected to the base station, we wouldn't really know what would happen when multiple users connect to it at the same time.

In actual fact, end users using Telia in Scandanavia were only able to reach half the speed of 20-25Mbps out of 50Mbps (their implementation is limited to 50Mbps when launched).

M1 will only launch when most issues are resolved and the availability of dongles from various manufacturers from Samsung, LG, Huawei, ZTE.

Will LTE replace HSPA+ in the long run. Well the term LTE (Long Term Evolution) probably answered it.

Next >>>

Discuss >>>
 

(C) Copyright 1998-2010 OCWorkbench.com