Good points. It all depends on what you are going to use the network for. If its web browsing, latency matters more. If its streaming a TV show, bandwidth matters more. I had a Sprint EVDO phone that would allow me to watch my TiVo via my Slingbox and Internet connection. There is no way my iPhone could do that via EDGE but the two surfed the web at roughly the same pace due to the latency constraint. The industry and the consumer are hooked onto buzz words too much as Carl mentions. If the iPhone had a supported native development environment, maybe the lack of a 3G network would be more of an issue. For email and web browsing, it shouldn't be a non-starter even though it seems to be for some.
Why are you arguing for Edge and against 3G? Isn't iPhone2 going to have 3G in 2008? In 2008, you will be writing about how much better 3G is than Edge.
Carl wrote about WiFi:
"the Internet experience on the Nokia was significantly slower and poorer than that of the iPhone."
Your Nokia E61i has a 220MHz ARM while iPhone has an ARM11 which is probably 3-4 times faster. Also I believe Nokia E61i does not have a graphics accelerator.
Another reason, other than battery-life, that Apple has not rushed to implement 3G is that AT&T's 3G network needs improving.
"Another reason, other than battery-life, that Apple has not rushed to implement 3G is that AT&T's 3G network needs improving"
YOU are arguing, it seems, for 3G before the technology is mature. I know Verizon has a large 3G network, but they are also CDMA, so......
Nice article. Another noteworthy point: 3G advertises rates like 3.6 mbps, but those are theoretical maxima; the actual speed depends on the number of users nearby, the distance to the transmission tower, and whether the user is moving or not. Real world performance often isn't all that much better than good old EDGE.
That being said, 3G or its successor will eventually be needed for a key thing: streaming video. You can bet that Apple has its eyes on this. AppleTV in your pocket, anyone?
Carl raises an interesting question but never answers it.
"But the question left unasked as been, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?""
Without any real world tests this is all just spin.
I have an iPhone and I really like it but I have to believe that all else being equal a 3G iPhone would be (much) better than an EDGE iPhone.
You're a stupid dumb nigger. Did you know that?
The user experience depends much more on the network than on the access technology. A network providing what is usually called internet accelerators will provide a great user experience independently of the access technology or the terminal. Such example is the Opera MiniBrowser that allows you to connect to the internet through a special proxy. This proxy optimizes the webpage retrieval and reformats the webpage into the browser format, while keeping connections alive between the proxy and the server in order to increase response time. People usually hate proxies but they are actually quite good in interconnecting wireless technologies with the wired network.
Having said that... to compare two wireless access technologies, you must do it with laptop computers with access cards. You cannot depend on the processing power of mobile phones. If the mobile phone is not able to keep up the data rate or if it's draining too much power, it should be designed to switch to lower data rates. It's not mandatory to always use the maximum data rate.
Good points to open up a discussion, but they have the danger of being equally misleading as the analysts that you quote.
Take the bandwidth vs latency issue for one - it's a valid point that people confuse bandwidth with latency. But what you fail to mention is that typical 3G latencies are less than half of those in EDGE networks. And that's a big difference.
What comes to the processing power, it's certainly true that most phones can't take full advantage of WiFi speeds - but that misses the point entirely. I would argue that most phones are powerful enough to take advantage of 3G speeds.
What comes to the real question, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?", based on my personal experience, yes and no.
Let me explain. The improvement in terms of performance, latency etc isn't necessarily what everyone would call "dramatic", but it's large enough to make the experience usable for me. As such, since it pushes the experience over a crucial usability threshold, the overall answer is that yes, it does improve the experience dramatically if done right. Of course, YMMV.
What good is EDGE when its hardly used in Europe?
Sorry sir, you failed massively!
Erm, seems like iPropaganda. I don't know about other 3G networks, but in UMTS data latency is *much* lower than in GPRS/EDGE.
Sorry, charlie, latency mattered more than bandwidth when phones were restricted to WAP browsing, and one of the iphone's hallmark features is the ability to browse full webpages and watch youtube videos - two things that do heavily benefit from increased transfer rates.
You love your iPhone, we get it. Stop trying to convince people that your network is great, too. It isn't.
I have to imagine that if the iPhone had 3G, you'd be singing a different tune.
I've used the iPhone and I've used a 3G capable Smartphone. I'll let you guess which one had a better 'user experience'. Hint: it wasn't the iPhone.
This is a really lame attempt to justify not having 3G on the iPhone. Yes, power consumption is higher (yet I can still browse all day on my Smartphone). You get what you pay for, after all.
Nice try, but your 'article' here amounts to nothing more than FUD built on convoluted logic.
Good point for the processor issue.
I don't get the argument that high speed networks are more error prone. Following this rationale, this would mean that our broadband or wifi network would be much less reliable than a good old modem.
Also, it is unclear why EDGE technlogy would be less prone to radio interference and reverberation than UMTS. COuld you please provide pointers of more factual articles about this point?
What is certain is that 3G has an advantage over GPRS as the later uses time slots that are unsued by voice call to transmit packets. Therefore, this technology was more or less piggybacking on the GSM system.
I don't know if EDGE retains the same principle but for sure, in 3G, data is now a first class citizen. This means that you got a good chance to retain your data connection if the nework becomes overloaded.
Wow, what a fanboy article. The truth is that EDGE has some of the highest latency of any data service. In my experience (an EDGE user for a few years now), I receive almost 700-900ms delays with EDGE compared to 100-200ms with EVDO. Streaming media over EDGE is useless. VoIP over EDGE is useless. I know you love your iPhone and all, but don't be ridiculous. This is almost as bad as saying an analog modem is better than broadband.
you, sir, are ignorant...
This is a very simplistic analysis. Moreover, the author seems to confuse bandwidth with frequency. While it is true that high-frequency signals are more error-prone, it cannot be extrapolated to say that high-bandwidth signals are error-prone! Regarding the latency vs. bandwidth issue, some people may confuse the two but at the end of the day, which of them is more important depends on what type of application is being used.
Dumb piece of shit. This is why i hate apple and their fanboys and will never touch their products ..EVER.
From reading this article I can confirm this fact: "All apple lovers loves apple because apple does all the thinking for them. So their dumb brains don't have to hurt thinking for themselves."
But the question left unasked as been, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?" Most pundits would reply...
Just out of curiosity, have you used ATT's BroadbandConnect card?
Yes, wireless is as much about latency as it is bandwidth. Broadband wireless latency is not as good as it should be.
Here are some general real world metrics for 3G: latency ~ 300ms Download: 800 - 900 Kb/s Upload: 200 - 400 Kb/s
Typcial advertised connect speed: 3.6 Mbps
Given these stats the following tasks are highly useable: Web, IM, Streaming music or video, Skype Video, check e-mail, download larger files quickly.
EDGE allows for a reasonable user experience for e-mail and IM but that is about it. File transfer speeds are abysmal and downloading web sites is also pretty poor. It seems most sites have decided that it's OK to have a 300k home page. Streaming music is far from reliable and video is out of the question.
Your point about phones not being equipped to handle the additional data and subsequenct processing is well made. This is probably true for the vast majority of phones. In the context of the iPhone however, I think there are major benefits to having 3G. The iPhone is the only phone on the market truly capable of exploiting a 3G connection - but lesser phones such as the nokia you mention provide a faster connection. In addition, that poorly performing nokia phone will do just fine as a mobile broadband bridge. As a result I'd prefer to see Apple figure out how to fit 3G in that sleek little device of theirs.
The bottom line is that especially for laptop users, and a lesser extent phone users, 3G is a huge step up. It's as fast as a shared public wi-fi connection, and easier to access. It's also more secure in a public context because connections are always made to a trusted party and given a software firewall the computer is protected from any outside attacks.
You are right on many points.
But your presumption and conclusion that lower latencies are more important than bandwidth is quite wrong.
Plain truth is that most of smartphones are used in business. And business you need bandwidth. Latency is problem - but movement of larger data sets is enabler for business deployments of mobile offices.
Lower latencies would help. And consumer oriented phones I think should treat latency as priority. But for business it is no-go since data volumes come first: without high bandwidth technology is not a starter.
As technologies would progress, I can imaging phones to have multiple data interfaces: WiFi, EDGE, UMTS, etc - if there would demand. Redundancy and complementing features of each other would cover most of the market needs, allowing customer to choose what to use when.
P.S. Picture now becomes more and more blurred. Steve Jobs had said that nobody would want to watch movies/tv shows on iPod. True. I can't agree more. But. (It very big "BUT".) iPod and iPhone now are really not media players anymore. People already treat iPhone/iPod Touch as notebook replacement - demanding more features of latter. So I think convergence is hitting the PC and mobile market as it never did before. Now it seems that analysts predicting that notebooks would rule PC sales were totally wrong: it is smartphones would rule both phone and PC markets soon.
"Plain truth is that most of smartphones are used in business. And business you need bandwidth"
What for, exactly? I would think the opposite is true. For business (email, IM, dl spreadsheets and word documents), it seems like you would want reliability and low latency. For home users (youtube, streaming audio, dl/ul pictures of the grandkids) you would want bandwidth.
My business communications use far less bandwidth than my home communications, across all my networked devices. I can see specific use-cases requiring high bandwidth (architects, graphic designers), but these are hardly mainstream business users.
I work for AT&T mobility and after reading your article I have to wonder if you've really ever used a 3G phone, and then used the same phone in an EGDE area.
First of all your argument about latency is done with before it starts. In most places were there is US 3G coverage it isn't just UMTS, it's HSDPA. The difference in latency is just amazing. Even on UMTS for you to see better experience on EDGE I'd have to wonder how large are the pages that you're pulling down? if they were mostly text and around 12k I could see you're point, but when I browse on my samsung A707 I usually visity pages in the 65k - 120k range, and to put it simply edge is almost painful. If I use the opera mini browse it gets a bit better because of compression, but still even UMTS provides a much better user experience.
As for your little formula for "consumption of any chip increases according to the frequency squared" I have to just stop and laugh for a bit.
Just so everyone at home can understand what that is so wrong take to existing radio technologies. Bluetooth and 802.11b WiFi. Now both of these operate at 2.4ghz. tell me which uses more battery strength and why? Both of these technologies have vastly different purposes, but it just goes to show that the overall principle does NOT hold. Not even close.
Also did you take that aging E61i on EDGE as well? your article is named "Why EDGE versus 3G matters less than you think" but it says you compared EDGE on one phone with Wi-fi and 3G on another. You don't have to be in the know with cellphones to realize that the Iphone was designed for web use. Possibly even more then for calls. (anyone who has borrowed an Iphone and accidentally called that persons mother can attest to that. [at least it's a good cover for when you call their mom]). Now the Nokia E61i is an aging pda phone.
Hmm wonder which will give better experience on the web no matter what protocol you use? Please tell me you actually did EDGE E61i tests and just didn't mention them. That would be one nice little piece of info that would make the article more believable.
Also the big battery drain with 3G is seen when on the edge between 2G and 3G when your phone is switching back and forth. For an explanation of that just look up PLMN list. It's too much to type here but it's the same reason your phone uses more battery while roaming. 3G does use more battery jucie then EDGE even while you have decent signal but the majority of 3G phones have bigger batteries as well. So I pretty much fail to see the point other then the initial cost of the phone. Which of course you pay more for newer faster technology then you do for old.
As for more error prone that's why 3G falls back to EDGE with low signal. your argument seems to say that because more information is in a 3G stream that any RF interference will cause more errors in a 3G stream because the bits are packed tighter. Well yeah but the same thing with my cable modem. its sen
boy oh boy have you actually used a 3GSM network???
I am on broadband supplied by Telstra's 3G in Australia and my AVERAGE download speed is 1.8 Mbps.. average ping 222m/s...... upload is approx 1Mbps..
damn I even work for Telstra, stooopid boy, it shows you don't work for a Telco, never use your conclusions if you ever want to work in one. you would be thrown out to the street with a Dunce's cap on. such FUD deserves serious scorn
well it cut me off but I was going to mention that in the same realm if you take cable modem vs 56k and unplug or cause interference on both for exactly the same amount of time that of course you will drop more data on the cable modem because more data is being sent at a time. data/time. so interference of a certain time will cause more data loss over higher bandwidth connections. does that mean that my 56k modem in my closet is more fault tolerant?
No. It doesn't....
I'll stick with 3G. You stick with your apple fanboy souvenir.
Oh btw one reason that 3G using more battery power was a deciding factor in not using it for your phone..... how much does it cost to get your battery changed again?
you're just a stupid fanboy
Good luck finding an EDGE network in Europe. Phone networks didn't really adopt it as they'd all thrown loads of money at the 3G networks which is now the de-facto standard pretty much. 3G coverage in the UK is now > 90% whereas EDGE is rarely found except in London where still coverage is patchy. This is why the iPhone is likely to flop in the UK, along with its $1800 contract commitment. That is, of course, if consumers make an informed decision which apple fan-boys rarely do anyway
well americans. stick with your supreme edge networks and use your iphones. the rest of the world is laughing at you. i hope you visit europe sometime soon. cheers
you never actually compared 3G with edge.
e61i does not have an american umts band available on it.
You compared edge with wi-fi, wi-fi takes more processor like you said...
3g on a nokia n95-3 is actually faster than wi-fi on most phones.
http://www.atmasphere.net/wp/arc...he-us-nokia-
n95
Bandwidth and latency affect online gaming, no? I can play World of Warcraft tethered through my 1xEVDO Blackberry. I could barely download my email when I was on Cingular using Edge. YMMV
Sorry, Carl, but you're wrong with your assumtions about the user experience of EDGE vs. UMTS ("3G").I'm from Berlin, Germany, and use both on a daily base on a Nokia N95. You've got UMTS available all over Berlin, and with T-Mobile equipping our subway stations, you've got EDGE available all _under_ Berlin, so I've got quite a nice testbed 
You're confusing some things in your article, as well: EDGE provides means of packaging and transporting information on the physical layer (RF, basically). To be able to transport packet data and to be "always on" you would use GPRS over EDGE, or EGPRS (you bought that as EDGE, presumably). GPRS will take care of frame handshaking and random access, which EDGE on the lower layer does not know of.
UMTS, on the other hand, defines upper layer data packaging, lower layer random access handshaking, and even synchronous / source routed access (phone calls, what GSM is used for in 1G/2G) in multiple layers. All in one new standard. Guess where the abstraction layers will work together more nicely? Differences in latency are almost neglectable and probably a myth initiated by apple
You assume that most of the data will be transcieved via TCP. I don't think so. Well, it might be true for the iPhone, where the user is supposed to mostly do "web 2.0" stuff when being online. The bandwidth provided by UMTS, on the other hand, can be used to receive and send digital audio / video streams (web TV, internet radio, VoIP) which is RTP, which is best transported by UDP. Most modern media clients (realplayer et al.) handle NAT problems quite effectively by pushing empty RTP/UDP packets with matching source/destination ports the other way, this way creating NAT bindings in the provider's network address translator (look up how a NAT works; the Cisco website has some nice info on that). So TCP/IP really does not matter.
Last point; highly subjective: When I use UMTS (not even "3.5G", i.e. 3.8 MBit/s, just plain old 382 kBit/s) in Berlin (being on the surface) and then switch to EDGE (entering a subway station) then (after some time of nothingness while the N95 switches networks) the connectivity plainly sucks (being abount 80 kBit/s, then). Honest.
One minor quibble regarding your CPU clock speed analogy: there's a reason why CPU clock speeds aren't increasing like they used to, and it isn't because (as you claimed) "the computer industry finally figured out that more gigahertz wasn't necessarily better". It's because clocks speeds CAN'T increase any more (at least, not by orders of magnitude). Intel and AMD long ago discovered that more clock speed means more sales, and they would love to keep increasing clock speed if they could. But they've run into a brick wall called "physics" (exercise for the reader: how far does light travel in one cycle of a 3 GHz clock?). We're now at the point where only relatively small increases are possible, and these increases are very expensive and difficult to engineer. So the shift away from clock speed didn't happen because it made sense, it happened because there was no other choice.
Cock in your ass. Thats what Steve Jobs has done to you, you stupid fucking nigger.
Please don't take what this guy says as the opinion of Americans. There are members of every country that would put the rest of their populations to shame. This is no different.
And the simple answer for low latency, high bandwidth transmissions is WiMax. The next generation of mobile broadband. It really is pretty amazing.
A chip's power consumption is NOT proportional to the square of frequency, you read it wrong. What you should have read is that the power consumption is proportional to the square of the power supply voltage; that's why you see new processors running at higher clock frequencies and lower supply voltages!
What a load of crap. Dude, I've got plenty of phones and EDGE doesn't come anywhere NEAR UMTS/HSDPA. Nice try though - I guess based on your single test between two vastly different hardware platforms you really think you've come up with something here.
I think I'm gonna pull some ludicris shit out of my ass and see if I can get on slashdot too.
This really is a ridiculous argument. Anyone who has ever owned both an EDGE phone and a 3G phone can attest to the speed difference. The ONLY halfway decent point made in this entire article is that battery life suffers. Although your formula/explanation of the math involved is laughable. What is with you Apple Fanboys and your complete lack of ability to reason and logic. You're becoming more and more like the MS Fanboys every day. How sad for all of us.
I've used an EDGE phone and I've used 3G (HSDPA) phone on AT&T's network, and I'll tell you flat out: latency on the 3G network flat out smokes the EDGE network. Both types of phones used the same SIM card. I've used a Cingular 3125(EDGE), a Samsung Sync(3G), and a Samsung Blackjack(3G). There is no question: 3G has higher throughput and lower latency. The difference in battery life was noticable, but not significant. If you charge your phone every night, does it matter if it's down one bar or two?
The ONLY situation where the EDGE network was slightly more desirable is when you're in a questionable area. The 3G phones try to connect 3G then fall back to EDGE. It creates a momentary delay, that you're not used to dealing with if you've grown accustomed to HSDPA.
The author is so full of it.
I've used both EVDO phones and EDGE phones--a lot--and EVDO always wins. Hands down.
Posted from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry 8830.
Yes, Author has worm apple bias. Only one could state that faster is slower. Props to Jobs whom can make these things happen.
This article propagates the myth that Edge is limited to 200,000 bits/second. Just now I checked my EDGE connection on my iPhone with AT&T and got a respectable 208.9 kbps data rate using http://www/iphonenetworktest.com. In the past I have seen higher data rates as well. If 200kbps is the theoretical max I would never expect to see anything close to that, yet I get higher.
The problem with a EDGE-handset here in Europe is that EDGE isn't ubiquitous.
Many operators skipped that step in the evolution and went straight to the UMTS- and HSDPA-networks.
And while 3, 7 or 14 Mbps might not make much sense yet in a mobile device such as a phone, it rocks for getting mobile with your laptop.
I've got an EDGE handset right now, and while it's more than enough for HTTP, mail or ICQ/MSN on the phone itself, I do wish I could use a faster network when using it for connecting my laptop to the Internet.
BTW: Just read the post above my former one.
EDGE has a theoretical max speed of 473.6 kbit/s
Normally, you only get 236.8 kbit/s service though...
He's right that latency matters. However, from my tests, 3g high-speed has much lower latency than EDGE, and this is precisely why it is important.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, my round-trip traceroute results are as follows:
Cingular EDGE 300-1500ms (worst case was more than 2400ms!)
Verizon EV-DO 114-290ms
This is also a key area that Sprint's WiMAX claims to excel, though I won't have measurements until it's available.
(Measurements taken by averaging a set of several tracert.exe results from a windows PC, connected using supplied connection manager software. EDGE tested with Sierra Wireless Aircard 860, EV-DO tested with Verizon V620. Sorry I don't have UMTS measurements, I had some UMTS coverage issues when I tested this.)
Bandwidth vs. Latency.
Ignoring interference and like issues, latency is greatly a function of the capacity (bandwidth) of the wireless link. As we approach the capacity the latency increases. An exponential increase in latency occurs when the load on the link is very near, at or exceeds the capacity. While the link (or network) is not overloaded latency should be minimal. Therefore, 3G should have less latency compared to EDGE given the same load.
However, the link quality does have a huge effect on load, especially TCP load. TCP's congestion control mechanism will slow it down to possibly low sending rates, if there is significant packet loss, for example. UDP traffic is more predictable as a benchmark in a sense since there is no effects from an inherent congestion control mechanism.
We should probably investigate the modulation and other PHY techniques between the two technologies, which I think will have significant performance differences with respect to interference, link-quality etc.
Bla bla bla..
stop your brainwashing....keep your iJunk stuff to your self...its pretty simple.. if I get my content downloaded 8 times faster with 3g than edge onto my N95, which is better? hmmmmmm....
Go brick an iphone..
The only thing I can say is that you must never have used an EDGE phone on the ATT network. I have, and compared to 3G phones I've used on ATT and other networks, it sucks azz.
I don't know anything about you, but all I can say is that in writing stuff like this, you must want people to laugh at you. Either that, or you're just a troll intentionally trying to make Apple fanboys look stupid.
Commenting by HaloScan
