in brief Despite the lack of 4G support in Australia, Apple’s new iPad offers substantially faster network speeds locally than previous models, according to tests conducted this week by Gizmodo. The publication reports (click here for the full article) improved real-world speeds and latency in all the locations it tested the two devices in Sydney and Melbourne this week:
“It’s pretty clear from these figures that the new iPad does deliver a faster data experience — which should equate to quicker web pages, smoother video streaming for services like Moshcam, and faster data downloads generally — but only as long as the data signal holds up.”
This isn’t a surprising result, considering the fact that the new iPad supports the dual-channel HSPA+ specification which Telstra has implemented on its network (the iPad 2 does not). It’s not clear at the moment whether that standard has been implemented on the networks of Optus and Vodafone, however, so the speed increases may be limited to Next G. In addition, Gizmodo notes that although the speeds are improved, they’re still not a patch on speeds achieved through Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 8.9 4G, which recently launched on Telstra’s 4G network.
One wider question is to what extent the speeds are an issue. Using Telstra’s Next G network, Delimiter has not experienced problems streaming video online from sources such as YouTube or GomTV on our iPad 2. In addition, web surfing and email speeds have been acceptable — even when rich media is involved. It seems likely higher speeds are always in demand on laptops, where large files are often being transferred around, but do users really care about these faster speeds being available on tablet devices and smartphones?
The worst thing abut using the iPad 3 (I refuse to call it “the new iPad” since I have an iPad, and need to differentiate it)… is Telstra (or someone) have decided not to enable the “Personal Hotspot” feature on it.
Back to *still* needing to jailbreak in order to get features that should not be dictated by your mobile carrier. Either I can download data from their network or not, a prepaid service does not (or should not) dictate my use-cases for it.
(this is based off paying with a friends ipad3 and a Telstra sim card.)
Personal Hotspot, you say? Hmm… yep, we’ve got that covered too: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/03/how-to-get-personal-hotspot-working-on-new-aussie-ipad-right-now-without-jailbreaking/
Have to agree, speeds are important but not as important as they are for laptops where downloading is going on. I have been using Telstra with iPad 2 for over 6 months now and am satisfied with performance.
Not terribly fast on the Vodafone network, I can tell you. :)
I’d been led to believe that Vodafone was actually doing much better these days, what with network improvements and higher congestion on the Telstra side of things. So, I got a cheap Vodafone SIM to plug into my spanking new iPad… but it crawls along terribly slowly!
Luckily there’s no contract involved, so I think I’ll switch elsewhere shortly.
Vodafone…. their network is the pits. I have been a 3 user for years, I always found their network reliable, fast enough and had a good range (as they had a deal with Telstra) then Vodafone brought 3 and the Telstra deal disappeared.
Vodafone’s network is simply not up to speed, I get constant dropouts, failure to find networks. I’m never ever going back to Telstra, there is history there. so I guess Optus is the only other option.
Comments are closed.