Mister Tech

By Lee Lup Yuen

Tips, tricks for the enterprise user

Who needs 3.5G?

Posted in Mister Tech by Lee Lup Yuen on Wednesday, November 29 2006 01:59 PM

(...waving my arms...) I do!

3.5G, technically known as HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), has arrived. HSDPA gives you mobile data download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps, compared to 384 kbps for 3G. HSDPA is now available to the general public in Singapore. You'll have it soon in your city too.

Why do I need 3.5G?

Download large email attachments: I'm using 3G on my laptop. Every time somebody sends me a multi-megabyte attachment, my email client freezes for a few minutes, downloading the large attachment via 3G. I need 3.5G to work more productively.

Upload large files: Some months back I produced a live "blogcast" on Singapore's Orchard Road shopping belt. I camped there for a few days, captured the event every hour with my Sony hi-def camcorder, edited the video on the spot and uploaded it to my video-podcast website via 3G. Uploading large video files via 3G was painfully slow, even after reducing the video resolution.

With 3.5G I can upload large files a lot more quickly. Since the bandwidth is now available, I can choose to upload high-def videos instead of low resolution ones. I may even consider doing a live video transmission and edit the video from my office.

Now that 3.5G is here, think about the bandwith-intensive applications that you can run on this faster mobile data network.

Disclaimer:
Views and opinions expressed in this blog are the author's, and do not necessarily represent those of ZDNet Asia.

Talkback 6 comments

Ever done a bandwidth check when using your 3G connection with a PC? I've had colleagues who said they seldom got beyond 128kbps; I'm not gonna say which telco. But yeah, 3.6Mbps is great--World of Warcraft by the beach sounds like fun.
Posted by Lloth on Wednesday, November 29 2006 02:42 PM

I don't know any reliable way to test the bandwidth, but I ran the bandwidth test on CNET's website (I believe it's hosted in the US) against 2 telcos in Singapore. I got roughly 200kbps for the faster telco, the other telco was significantly slower.

200kbps for surfing US-based websites is quite acceptable to me, I feel.
Posted by lupyuen on Wednesday, November 29 2006 05:25 PM

any idea if the pricing is going to be exorbitant?
Posted by pcheong on Friday, December 01 2006 04:47 PM

Prices seem quite fair. I got this from the ZDNet Asia Website:

"..S$22 (US$14.17), S$38 (US$24.48) and S$68 (US$43.80) for download speeds of up to 384Kbps, 1.8Mbps and 3.6Mbps, respectively.."

Seems attractive for a mobile broadband service. But I don't think I'll be ditching my Singtel 10Mbps ADSL plan soon.
Posted by Lloth on Monday, December 04 2006 12:20 PM

Speaking of video uploads, have you guys heard of any multimedia collaboration software? I've found this while at creativemac.com. syncvue.com. Looks interesting, especially for mobile video editors.
Posted by Lloth on Monday, December 04 2006 02:11 PM

Speaking of multimedia collaboration -- do you think a mobile version of YouTube will be the next big thing? Then again maybe it won't happen until we have sufficient mobile upload bandwidth (e.g. HSDPA).
Posted by lupyuen on Monday, December 11 2006 02:01 PM

Latest in Blog Central

Subscribe to BlogCentral

Click this link to view this blog as XML.
Add this feed to your online news reader

About the blogger

Lee Lup Yuen

Lee Lup Yuen is passionate about mobile phones and PDAs, as he is constantly buying new gadgets and programming them in J2ME, .NET, Symbian and AppForge. He has developed commercial applications with mobile technologies like SMS, MMS, WAP, 3G video streaming and location-based services.