3 To Launch 10Gb Cap HSDPA package for €20 a month today

pm.

do ya think it would be good for online gaming ?

Caterpillar

smellslikeshoes wrote:

Hopeing vodafone will respond with a better package. Up to now they have had a bigger cap going for them but now 3 are twice as fast twice the cap and half the price.

Better be a bit careful here folks....

Vodafone have a cap of 5GB (5 Gigabytes)
Three have a cap of 10Gb (Gigabits)

Unless I'm mistaken, this means that Vodafone are offering a cap 4 times greater than Three are offering.

(5GB = 40Gb)
(10Gb = 1.25GB)

clearz

dlofnep wrote:

Does anyone know of a coverage penetration map for the 3g networks?

http://www.three.ie/coverage/index.htm

Click on an area of the map to view the 3G coverage for it. Dosen't accually seem too bad at the moment. They claim to have 80% population coverage which aint too bad. I dream of the day when I can work from beside a lake on a laptop with my fishing rod cast out. Might be closer than I thought .

grey wolf

I,m in central Dublin and got 3s USB card last week-useless indoors-will be returning it for a refund.

smellslikeshoes

Caterpillar wrote:

Better be a bit careful here folks....

Vodafone have a cap of 5GB (5 Gigabytes)
Three have a cap of 10Gb (Gigabits)

Unless I'm mistaken, this means that Vodafone are offering a cap 4 times greater than Three are offering.

(5GB = 40Gb)
(10Gb = 1.25GB)

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

Snaga

Just to expand on Watty's post above...

In telecomms (for use in bitrate measurements) a kilobit is quite literally - 1000 bits. Its a decimal measurement 10 to the power of 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiloBit

A kibibit (KIloBInaryBIT) is the correct term for 1024 bits - based on the binary measurement - this is 2 to the power of 10 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibit

The binary format is used for storage devices, while the decimal format should be used to describe bit rates like in this thread!

Boston

watty wrote:

Or even the Mobile data services sold with 10Mbyte caps!

<<Pedant mode>>
Strictly speaking 1024 = 1k and 1024 x 1024 = 1M is wrong, k = 1000 (kilo) and M =1,000,000 (Mega).

George Boole in 1840s/1850s developed Boolean Alegebra based on counting in 1s and 0s instead of up to 9. Nothing to do with Shannon really (Communication theory 1948).

Memory chips are addressed by binary coded address wires. This means memory chips (unlike hard drives) can only have powers of two storage, 10 bits address = 1024 locations.

Hard drives have a certain storage per track which is dependent on modulation, head gap, recording mode etc. This has no intrinsic "power of two" like memory addressing. Then you have an arbitrary number of tracks decided by platter radius and head width (Floppy disk and stereo cassette tape have similar size tracks just under 0.5mm, original tapes & drums used 6mm tracks). Then you have an arbitrary number of platters / heads (not what is Bios, that is fictional) depending on physical thickness of platters, head /arm height and package height.

Thus Hard Disk drives are measured in true decimal K & M, not the "computer memory industry" approximate k & M of 1024 instead of 1000

Different utilities in OS may use Binary "fake k" of 1024 or "true k" of 1000 in calculating and displaying storage.

<</Pedant mode>>

At an operating system level though you talk about disk space in terms of pages to the power of 2, which are themselves storage locations those size is equal to 2 to some power. Disk I/O also works in a binary fashion. So while the disk themselves might not be bounded to binary values, the data they hold is ultimately translated into that format.

Additionally when doing downloads your "connection speed" may be a raw kbps (bits) figure including any protocol / signalling or error correction overhead. The kBps (Bytes) figure is actual bytes getting written to disk. The server may be doing "on the fly compression", this will have no effect on MP3 or DIVX or ZIP, but on uncompressed programes, databases or text files you can get on average 2:1 compression, or even more so your data link can seem twice or three times faster than it really is. Normally the speed of bytes transferred is closer to 10:1 than the real physical 8:1 Bit to Byte ratio.

In that case it not be something like 10 bits to every byte by the time you strip away start/stop bits, framing bits, headers, and pre/post-ambles?

The binary format is used for storage devices, while the decimal format should be used to describe bit rates like in this thread!

Other way around no?

smellslikeshoes

pm. wrote:

do ya think it would be good for online gaming ?

No not good for gaming. Expect pings of 150ms+, Might be suitable for some strategy games and maybe for some mmorpgs but useless for anything else.

Snaga

Boston wrote:

Other way around no?

Erm - did you read the provided links or just snap-reply?

Boston

Snaga wrote:

Erm - did you read the provided links or just snap-reply?

I did and I accept it. Not because you linked to Wiki though, but because I just spent the last two weeks studying for a digital communications exam and I know that Capacity(bit rate) is directly related to bandwidth, which can take any real value.

I did however read your post as contradicting watty where you say "binary format is used for storage devices". He posts outlines the arguement for decimal format.

Snaga

Ah I see the confusion from my post - mea culpa on a not being specific enough. (I was not providing a counter to Watty's post).

To clarify-

Information stored on a digital device are measured in a binary format - this covers computer memory chips and any other chip based storage (e.g. flash drives) .

The manufacturers of Hard Disks market the devices using the decimal format - but your pc will still measure it in the correct binary format as it is a storage device.

In Telecomms - the decimal format is always used when talking about bit rates.

Caterpillar

smellslikeshoes wrote:

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

So, is the 3.6Mbps 3.6 Megabits/s or 3.6 MegaBytes/s?

I thought upper case 'B' = Bytes, lower case 'B' = bits???

Just curious how you can be so definite.

Xcellor

smellslikeshoes wrote:

No your mistaken.
Vodafone have cap of 5 Gigabytes and 3 have a cap of 10 Gigabytes. The whole bit/byte discussion comes up on this site so much.

From what 3 told me when i phoned it was gigabytes not bits. That would make sense since they measure what you go over by in MB not Mb. Also if it was megabits that would mean the other package would be 3000 megabits (375 megabytes!!). Also all the other providers deal with MB/GB so it wouldn't make much sense for 3 to go in a different direction.

That's just my opinion anyways,

ballooba

So is this €40 per month total?

i.e. basic package plus broadband.

Or can you get this on it's own?

smellslikeshoes

Xcellor wrote:

From what 3 told me when i phoned it was gigabytes not bits. That would make sense since they measure what you go over by in MB not Mb. Also if it was megabits that would mean the other package would be 3000 megabits (375 megabytes!!). Also all the other providers deal with MB/GB so it wouldn't make much sense for 3 to go in a different direction.

That's just my opinion anyways,

Your reading into things to much. 3 have 10Gigabyte limit and voda have 5 gigabyte limit.

Dankoozy

Caterpillar wrote:

So, is the 3.6Mbps 3.6 Megabits/s or 3.6 MegaBytes/s?

I thought upper case 'B' = Bytes, lower case 'B' = bits???

Just curious how you can be so definite.

its 3.6 megabit. i think 576kbit upstream, the broadband finder site lists it at 384. of course these speeds assume you are standing beside an empty HSDPA base at 6am on a sunday morning with no interference

Boston

Actually it just occurred to me that WCDMA uses Qpsk or Qam (not to sure about this one) so the modulation is in powers of two so shouldn't the data rate also be some power of two? Like the may a T1 line has 1.544MBits/ps because the modulation is 8 bit PCM. Also when they talk about Chips in white papers I persume that when they are using the power of 2 format.

watty

Speeds are always in "bits" because traditionally communication was serial data, one bit at a time. Since bits & Bytes used b=bit, B=byte.

Cap = Storage, which has always been in Bytes, as storage addressing is traditionally measured in Bytes (Word sizes on address busses are another story). G can mean 1000x1000x1000 or 1024x1024x1024. Traditionally with computers Disk capacity is measured in x1000 increments and Memory in x1024 increments for good physical reasons.

I'd say ISPs mean GigaBytes for CAP where G=1024x1024x1024, but they would be perfectly correct to use 1000x1000x1000 measurement as Technically Giga = 1000,000,000 and 1024x1024x1024 is Gibi.

Quote 1,073,741,824 = 1024x1024x1024 = 2^30
The IEC recommends that this unit should instead be called a gibibyte (abbreviated GiB) not Gigabyte as Giga is defined by SI as 1,000,000,000 = 10^9


If it turns out that "3" are advertising a cap in "bits" not "Bytes" they need hauled up be advertising standards people as that would be extremely misleading an unethical advertising. We need decent consumer rights groups in this Country.

http://www.three.ie/handsets_new/datacards_e220.htm

Definitely shows b rather than B. So the page either has a typo (four times?) or they are weasels.

Snaga

We are fundamentally talking about measurement standards here.

This debate grew out of people measuring bit rates.

Lets take a physical circuit that can push 1024 bits per second. How do we measure that?

Do we measure it as 1kilobit per second just because the circuit uses a base 2 encoding scheme?

No we dont - we use the acceptable measurment unit as agreed by the industry.

So - as one kilobit per second is 1000 bits per second - this circuit has a maximum bit rate of 1.024 kilobits per second (or 1Kibibit per second!).

The bit rate of the circuit doesn't change.

Boston

Snaga wrote:

We are fundamentally talking about measurement standards here.

This debate grew out of people measuring bit rates.

Lets take a physical circuit that can push 1024 bits per second. How do we measure that?

Do we measure it as 1kilobit per second just because the circuit uses a base 2 encoding scheme?

No we dont - we use the acceptable measurment unit as agreed by the industry.

So - as one kilobit per second is 1000 bits per second - this circuit has a maximum bit rate of 1.024 kilobits per second (or 1Kibibit per second!).

The bit rate of the circuit doesn't change.

Yes but what is the 3.6Mbs quoted in Megi ormebibit, I've looked at some white papers and they don't say/

Sam Vimes

watty wrote:

There are 4 phone shopes in my local shopping Centre.
Meteor, Vodaphone, O2
and Allegedly Carphone Warehouse.
However no matter what I ask them they offer me something from 3 (also in other Carphone Warehouses). They seem to know little about the products or HSDPA/3G and claim that 3 offers the best service and only 3 offer HSDPA 3Mbps. This is untrue. Vodaphone and O2 also both do HSDPA.

I'd now take anything they say about 3 with a pinch of salt and they are obviously not impartial retailers

they sell all the networks, they are impartial. the reason they told you that the 3 offer is the best is because it is the best.


vodafone only works at 3mbps in a small part of the country where 3's entire network is hsdpa or will be very soon (not sure if its official yet)

vodafone's is twice the price and has half the download limit

the less said about o2's the better. 10GB on o2 would cost about 10000 euro

Sponge Bob wrote:

Be very very very careful if using any data package abroad. The roaming charges are often €50 a Mb ...20 megabytes for €1000 ...yes:eek: and are not counted in your allowance

with the €20 pacakge it'll only roam onto other 3 networks abroad and doesn't cost any more. the 40 a month tariff can roam onto other networks but i'm not sure of the prices

pm. wrote:

do ya think it would be good for online gaming ?

nope. too much latency

Sam Vimes

Caterpillar wrote:

So, is the 3.6Mbps 3.6 Megabits/s or 3.6 MegaBytes/s?

I thought upper case 'B' = Bytes, lower case 'B' = bits???

Just curious how you can be so definite.

its 3.6 megabits, 450 megabytes

upper case does mean bytes

Moriarty

I've just merged the two related threads.

ballooba

ballooba wrote:

So is this €40 per month total?

i.e. basic package plus broadband.

Or can you get this on it's own?

Can anyone answer this Q please?

I'm really enjoying the whole bits/bytes discussion too though of course.

Sponge Bob

€20 total with 10Gb Cap.

Must have a 3 signal not a voda signal pretending to be 3 .

ballooba

Sponge Bob wrote:

€20 total with 10Gb Cap.

Must have a 3 signal not a voda signal pretending to be 3 .

Thanks. Will be in to get one on Tues then.

Xcellor

People keep saying that the latency / ping will be not so good on this service but from what I am reading this technology has the potential if correctly implemented to be 30ms-50ms perhaps even less.

Anyone who has 3 needs to make them aware that 100-150 is not acceptable when compared to other BB providers.

From my experience with 3 so far they seem quite friendly albeit offshore somewhere. I have been told however the upload speed is the same as the download speed... eager to prove that statement false.

Clik

I've have had the 3 datamodem now for nearly 2 weeks and finding it excellent. Getting speeds up to 1.4MB/s in south offaly but it does vary quite a bit. Have tried it also in Tullamore, Ballinasloe and Athlone and got similar speeds. However, north of Athlone failed to connect at all. Service was not available for much of sunday but hopefully this was only a teething problem. Really enjoyed telling eircom to disconnect my landline having been promised broadband from them for over 3 years with no success.

watty

Packet voice based systems such as 3G / HSDPA can't get anywhere near as good as 50ms. 120ms maybe, and 150ms to 170ms is typical. Some future "evolution" of HSDPA may do lower pings. But not the real network today.

4G pure IP based systems can go down to 30ms typical, now today.

Upload is much slower than Download. maximum on 3G is 128K (typical 60k) and on HSDPA is 384k (typical 200k). Max download speeds on 3G is 384K and HSDPA curreently 3.6Mbps. 28k is achievable on GSM (2 channels used) and 56k typical on GPRS.

A 56k dialup is typically 36k to 44k in both directions. ISDN is 64K or 128k (error free) in both directions, the 128k ISDN can roughly transfer equivalent to a hypothetical 170k analog dialup or 3G due to its zero error rate and uncompressed link state. (56k dialup uses compression).

(edit: I may explode, just noticed post count!)

Xcellor

Here's an interesting document concerning the subject

http://www.ericsson.com/hr/about/events/mipro_2007/mipro_1137.pdf

Also in new zealand
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/372

"Latency in the 40-50ms range. Now this addresses a major weakness in the present 3G service, namely the high, 200ms plus latency (the responsiveness of the data connection). With such low latency, you can use the HSDPA service for online gaming. It is in fact better than Telecom's ADSL, which currently has artificially high latency introduced to prevent customers from using Voice over IP on their connections (all with the Commerce Commission and NZ government's blessing)."

Looks like there is already the ability to reduce latency so that this could become a real competitor in the BB world.