John Linton HSPA works well for me as a traveling person who needs internet in different locations at different times of the day and night and likes to use their own laptop/notebook . It is really easy to use if the carrier has good coverage which, in Australian terms, I think Optus do.
I think my few days experience has demonstrated that the promised 3.6 mbps download is not a reality yet and how the imminent 7.2 mbps and by the end of 2008 14.4 mbps speeds will actually be delivered has to be seen – certainly Telstra are very confident they can deliver such services and they are the current Australian leaders in delivering these sorts of services.
The issue, in Australia and from what I’ve seen so far in the UK, is that ‘real’ download allowances are not going to meet the needs of medium down loaders (and will never meet the needs of ‘heavy’ down loaders) in the immediate future and may never do that.
Looking at the ‘plans’ offered by HSAP UK service providers indicates that the apparent price per gb downloaded is around the equivalent of $A10.00 – which to me seems to be an excellent deal. However the reality of what an HSPA end user will actually be able to download may well be only 50% to 60% of what the plan’s allowance is stated to be.
I am basing that statement on what I know of the ‘real costs’ to the network provider in July 2008 of carrying traffic across an HSPA type of network. Firstly, let me say that my knowledge of the ‘real’ costs are based on two years of discussions with Australian, Asian and US providers of HSPA type services which means I extrapolate from the prices offered to Exetel and prices offered to wholesalers whose volumes are 100 times larger than Exetel could dream of doing plus what I see in Australia and the UK of the carriers own plans.
I certainly don’t know any actual internally generated carrier pricing models.
So let’s start with my UK HSPA service from TMobile who offers me 3 gigabytes of traffic (download and upload) for the equivalent of $A3.00 per gigabyte – providing I use the whole allowance in a single 12 midnight to 11.59.59 period. I tried yesterday to download for 9 hours from a super quick site and managed 410 megabytes on a connection that was telling me it was downloading at 2.45 mbps. During that download, and I was either at dinner or asleep, it uploaded 310 megabytes; something I would have thought was impossible (I was not using P2P). My other usage during the 24 hour period was less than 150 megabytes downloaded and, again strangely, 85 megabytes uploaded. In total, I downloaded less than 600 megabytes for my $A10.00 – and I tried really hard to ‘hammer’ my connection. So my actual charge per mb downloaded/uploaded was still a very cheap $A12.00. On the previous two days my combined uploads and downloads didn’t exceed 300 megabytes and I would think they would be typical of my general usage on email and browsing and you could add another 200 megabytes on top of that for other things I would normally do on a daily basis but haven’t been doing on this trip.
So my ‘average use’ would be costing me somewhere North of $17.00 per gigabyte used – if there was no daily limit – which on this plan there is so it costs more than that using this plan. Either way the plan costs $A300.00 a month and I don’t think any residential user could begin to consider it.
So the other plans in the UK are so similar that they may as well all be offered by the same provider and their per gigabyte cost to the end user on a 24 month plan is a theoretical $A12.00 per gb per month once you strip away all the nonsense. Sounds Ok but if other people get hit with the strangely large upload statistics I’ve experienced over the past few days the actual cost per gb downloaded looks closer to $A20.00 per gb per month. I’m not saying that there is any ‘cheating’ going on – just that the uploads using HSPA (on a single sample) are approximately two times higher than what I personally experience using ADSL.
I don’t know what to make of the aberration on uploads vs downloads and will wait until the end of the trip before drawing a conclusion if it continues.
My current view is that if Exetel charges $A15.00 per gb DOWNLOADED (no uploads counted) it would be the best offer (true value) on the UK market for any person who had actually experienced using another HSPA service and didn’t fall for the marketing flim flam that exists in the UK “sales material”.
The UK providers charge of $210 for a HuaWei E220 ‘dongle’ that costs them less than $A60.00 (probably less than that)is another interesting price decision but on 24 month contracts they waive that cost). So that’s my finding now and I’ll re-check the data in 2 weeks time.