To really appreciate how much quicker is the 3G, I just loaded Party Rock Anthem YouTube video (6 minutes and 16 seconds long) in approximately 2 minutes.
Now let’s compare it with the 512K DSL connection on my desktop. After 5 minutes of loading, I was barely half way through.
Najib, don’t get too excited just yet since this is still in testing phase and not everyone with a 3G device got 3G yet.
Also, there’s a bandwidth limit for each of Alfa and MTC that they’re going to use. Let me explain why your 512 connection at home is not really 512:
Your ISP buys 512 from Ogero at, say, $500 – single IP address dedicated bandwidth (really 512). They sell it back to users at (also assume for illustration purposes) $50. so to make some profit they do some calculations and come up with something called contention ratio. They add the cost of maintenance, equipment, staff, taxes, overhead etc. to their cost of acquiring the 512 and it ends up costing $1000. Add some $500 profit per link and at $50, they will count the contention raio to be 50/1500 or 1/30. This means that they assume that at any given time, 1 out of 30 users will be online (In reality the ratio is more like 1/50 or more!). The same thing will happen when they upgrade the network on the 1st of october and eventually with 3G… I feel that to make even higher profits they will increase the contention ratio after october 1st.
One sentence I missed: So if 20 out of 50 users are online 40% with a 1/50 contention rate, your speed will be 512/20 = 25 Kbps. Also remember this is a lower case b – bit – and not the upper case B – Byte.
Richard,
We still will have a better connection than before and it is an acceptable connection which is really what counts most.
The cap is the thing am worried about.
GET A LIFE MAN !!!!!!!!
This is not an accurate test. The video that is streaming over 3G is lower quality than the one streaming through your desktop. When YouTube detects you’re on a 3G connection is sends you a lower quality feed so that you don’t consume too much from your bandwidth.
Richard got it completely wrong. What he is describing is how dial up internet is operated. DSL and broadband usually oversell their capacity by about 40% (probably much higher for Lebanon) so if they had 100mbps, they would sell 140mbps and assume that not everyone will use it at the same time. Having 30 people on the same 512 connection will just not work.
Haissam,
what your describing (oversell) is the same as what I am saying in different words. I am a satellite engineer in the US and we do provide internet through Satellite. They can’t simply oversell by 40% as that’s a loss seen the price Ogero charges on a dedicated link. Try a speedtest from your DSL in busy hours and non busy and you’ll see what I am talking about.
2arraftna el-3G
Mark,
I was wondering why the video quality was less, guess that explains it, but it doesn’t make sense that they don’t give you the choice to watch it in a high quality?
Anyway once I share the 3G with my laptop, I will test properly.