Mobile broadband is rather narrow says Broadband Genie

One of the advantages of having a broadband speed test that can take in mobile broadband as well as fixed lines, is that you can put out press releases every now and again demystifying the claims of the UK cellular providers and cite the true speed of broadband connections. And that’s exactly what Broadband Genie has done every now and then, and says that today most mobile broadband connections are still under 1 Mbps.

Broadband Genie’s latest report shows that two thirds of users experienced a mobile broadband performance of below 1Mbps this year – around 15% of some claimed speeds, which are always cited for mobile broadband, at up to 7.2Mbps. The majority of products from 3 UK, O2, T-Mobile and Orange are advertised at 'up to' 3.6 Mbps, but the average user gets just 0.87 Mbps – about 24% of the top-end speed.

This is achieved simply be measuring data transfer rate on a speed test designed to get maximum throughput from your broadband line. Mobile broadband relies on HSDPA, a process whereby a single data channel is set up in a portion of the mobile spectrum, and like Wi-Fi, that channel is then shared among all the customers attached to that particular base station segment (there are usually three segments per base station). Many base stations also have constrained backhaul, so even if the air interface can get more data backwards and forwards, it cannot get it fast enough from there to the nearest internet hub and back.

The speed test in 2009 was carried out by 3,600 users and only 16 (about 0.5%) managed a speed of more than 3Mbps. The statistics follow reports from Ofcom earlier in the year that showed fixed-line broadband products, many from the same companies, also failed to live up to their advertised capabilities.

The majority of the tests (65%) were slower than 1Mbps, with more than half of these (39%) actually below 0.5 Mbps and around 26% getting results between 1Mbps and 2Mbps, with less than 7% getting 2 to 3Mbps.

All of which is to be expected, given that as cellular operators add more capacity, they are signing up more and more customers. In the end there has been barely a noticeable increase in speed across the year and it appears that cellular operators are only provisioning for under 1 Mbps.

Future generations of mobile broadband up to 2013 will scale to 10 Mbps, then 14 Mbps, and then will double to 28 Mbps and finally to 42 Mbps, but it is likely that each base station that gets those kinds of upgrades when they come, will have to share that traffic with many other customers, and experienced speeds are likely to remain under 1 Mbps. If you are the only person online at midnight, close to a base station, then you might get 3 Mbps today, but then for only a minute or two. Most devices only have a chip in them that can support 3.6 Mbps and some even slower than this, so even as the networks scale and move to the 100 Mbps of LTE come 2013 and beyond, the entire handset and dongle population will have to change to take advantage of it, and backhaul at the base station will have to go up considerably.

Broadband Genie called for advertising claims to change from the major operators, which is a fairly reasonable request we think.