Vodafone or Bust

We all know that the smartphone market is all about data, something the telcos didn’t get right when the first plans came out. Now the data is coming and we are eating it up, unless you have an iphone on vodafone.

So iphone is going to be a wifi distributer, great news you say. Well here is the first thing you need to do. GET OFF VODAFONE NOW. I had 4 years of vodafone on 3g and then 3gs and Voda kindly gave us 3gig per month. So in 4 years the most I used in a month was 240mb, here’s why, the network is so slow that it crawls, forget youtube it just spins, forget app store for anything of a decent size (5mb) and basically wait ages for mail and twitter to refresh and safari to load. If you are in denial then sit beside me and we will speed test, you will lose!
So I went to iphone 4 and went to Telecom XT, the hated network with the bad reputation. Result ? = unbelievable

I’m in rural northland tethering to my Air and internet sharing, son on ipod using Vonage talking to his mate in Wales, wife on ipad getting email and clicking through to links to online shopping, daughter on macbook (god knows what she is up to) me using the air to bet on the TAB and send texts on the iphone while thethering. The pages are loading with a snap.
In exactly the same spot using 3gs with Vodafone I couldn’t use the browser on the iphone because it timed out. It was slower than dial up !

I speed test from rural northland on the iphone and get 5.4mb down and 1.2mb up. I go to Waitangi, same news, Whangarei marginally slower but blistering compared to that other nonsense.

The answer is in the bandwidth that vodafone (900/2100mhz) and telecom (750-850mhz) networks run on. The iphone is built to run on Telecoms 3G (850mhz) frequency, it can run partially on Vodafones 3G frequency. So this is a known fact but that doesnt mean anything, it’s just a sales pitch. Well you carry on with Vodafone and your 2 and a half G network and I will blister away with endless mobile broadband in my hand. Oh there is a possible savior on its way for the vodafone iphone users, the new phones for Verizon may have a different mhz, but you would need a new iphone and a long wait (something you are used to if you're on Vodafones network).

Good luck suckers, enjoy your iphone at half speed.