Hot-Spot or Mobile Broadband

3 have announced that they will double their broadband speeds by the end of the summer.  They currently operate at a theoretical max download speed of 3.6Mb, although they only quote 2.8Mb as a top speed as 3.6Mb is virtually impossible to achieve unless you sit live under a base station.  Most people will receive 1Mb to 1.5Mb on average, which allows you to download a music track in no more than 30 seconds, so it’s still pretty fast.  Most home broadband connection’s only achieve a speed of around 3Mb according to a report late last year by the BBC.

Their network top speed is increasing to 7.2Mb which 3 state will get most customers to an actual download speed of 2Mb.  They aim t double the top speed again to 14.4Mb in the future, which we assume means a download speed of 3Mb to 4Mb which would challenge many of the home broadband providers.

Find out more about 3’s Mobile Broadband deals

Vodafone have announced the results of, what is claimed to be, the biggest trial into Mobile Broadband speeds in the UK.  They state that the survey proves that:

“…nationally Vodafone is the fastest, most reliable mobile broadband network in all aspects of file download, web page loading and on both datacard modems and handsets.

An independent company carried out 28,000 tests over 10 weeks across the UK and in different types of locations.

Sounds great, but I would love to see the numbers to see how far ahead they were of their compeition, what speeds were achieved and how they fared region by region.  The use of ‘nationally’ suggests that they may not be the leaders in every region…hmm.

Watch out for further developments in the Mobile Broadband speed wars in the near future.