I I was reading a well worded explanation of what the catch-all term “4G” is over on blog.three.co.uk.
I was really pleased to hear their plans on 4G. I have heard the term used a lot on US blogs and it didn’t seem very straight-forward. I wasn’t even sure if the UK would be using the term.
I have a Samsung Omnia 7 and that gets great data speeds. That could be partly down to the new IE browser on Windows Phone 7 though. In most areas I get a “3G+” icon in the top corner instead of just “3G”. This made me wonder am I getting the HSPA+ service already? That would mean I could potentially get speeds up to 128Mbps!
Knowing that three have a great blog team, I left a comment and also quizzed their twitter account @ThreeUK if that was indeed capable on my phone. Unfortunately it wasn’t really the answer I wanted.
The 3G+ symbol on the Samsung Omnia 7 actually denotes faster HSDPA data transfer as opposed to “standard” 3G. HSPA+ is the next evolution again beyond HSDPA and is not yet common in handsets
Moderator: Sedge
According to Wikipedia: “Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Megabits/s”. I used the Mobile speed test site at DSL Reports and that showed I was getting an average speed of 3Mbps. If you just have a 3G icon that means the UMTS network is connected; If you have 3G+ (or H) icon the HSDPA/HSUPA network connected
So not quite a match for the “4G” LTE-Advanced technology. That will enable mind-blowing theoretical maximum speeds of up to 1Gbps. Hopefully that will arrive in the Windows 8 operating system timeframe of 2012-2014(Phones and Desktop OS alike) and that has the potential to really change the way we work and play
P.S. I found looking at all the related speeds a bit confusing, especially remembering that MB (MegaBytes) is different to Mb (Megabits). Thankfully, I found an old-school Bit Calculator that converts between all the sizes » BitClac
Image Source: mymobile.three.co.uk This is actually a great online “user manual” for the Omnia 7 that explains what all the icons mean and more
I have an Omnia 7 too and was wondering what 3G+ was! Thanks for looking into it and publishing this article.
Congrats for the explanation!