Heck, I’ve got myself a 500MB x 12 months broadband subscription with my recent “purchase” of an iPhone from Maxis. It was a really good decent deal since 500MB a month is rather sufficient for me (I’m gonna use this solely for phone connectivity) rather than having to pay more for additional bandwidth but not being able to completely utilize the quota given.

Don’t ask me how I got it but its legal. haha. I know some of you know how this thing works.

Okay so called HSDPA eh? I did a speed test on the phone itself when I received the sms. only 380kbps. Ok never mind, then I tethered the connection to the pc next to me and managed to get a spike of 3mbps+ and then it dropped to 800kbps. Arghh. Since it wasn’t my pc I did not do any diagnostics on what had caused the speed to drop.

Went back and tested the connection again. Alright looks like I’ve found the reason for the drop in speed.

Pings were averaging at around 50ms during idle time and once something huge starts downloading, it spikes up to 3000ms and eventually times out. Full bars on my signal meter did not seem to help either. However moving the phone to a few “strategic” locations seemed to help maintain the connection for a little bit longer. (guess a good feng shui master is needed then). I did the speed test a couple of times and they were no where near the advertised 7.2mbps speed. The highest was around 4mbps only. Just a wild guess, perhaps the HSDPA network at my area is too congested? Upload speeds did not go above 60kbps but that didn’t really matter.

Here’s one of the screen-shot that I remembered to copy the link down.

Hey Ai Yean, did you just say that your Maxis broadband subscription was running slow? Mine’s even slower!