Disconnected
On Saturday my home broadband went down. I switched to mobile broadband using a pre-pay 3 SIM and a Nokia phone, as I had it ready to go for just such situations.
It worked but the experience felt slow. This matters irrespective of whatever the technical speed tests say (300-600Kbps download when I checked). How fast something feels is what consumers care about. I’ve written about this idea here before in more detail.
So, what’s the reason it felt slow? I think because the latency — sometimes call ping — was around 300ms. This is around ten times what a home DSL or cable connection delivers. Also, the upload speed was dramatically worse than the pretty good, genuinely broadband-quality, download speed. The average of three tests was a mere 20Kbps upload speed. For comparison, an old analogue dial-up modem can provide 33Kbps. I wonder sometimes if mobile broadband is really dial-up’s heir rather than home broadband’s cousin.
