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Really, How fast is your Treo?
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UPDATE. The Poll is not working, but I have a better idea. Ignore the poll :) If you could all please email me your full results [email protected] with your provider and your location, I will try to compile the data and next week will release it as a followup article.
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Really, How fast is your Treo?
The age old question may finally have been answered by Hexlet LLC with their freeware Bmeter program.
From their website:
"Bmeter stands for Bandwidth Meter. It allows you to measure effective download speed of your network connection... Unlike PING command which is common way of measuring connection speed with ICMP packets, Bmeter downloads stream of data over TCP connection, just like you do when talking to your mail of web server. Performance of TCP connections depends on many factors: packet loss, TCP window size, PPP protocol overhead, etc. By using TCP connection Bmeter simulates real-life performance of typical networking application on your Palm as close as possible."
So, I am curious, and I am sure others are to how fast GPRS, PCS Vision, and Dialup really are. There will be a new poll in a related thread for this article where you can post your average result, along with your posts posting the entire output if you so choose.
This is what I got, and it sure surprised me!
My average speed for dialup based off of 10 downloads of 4 KB each was 742 bytes a second. The minimum speed was 180 bytes a second, and the maximum was 1334. I use MSN has my ISP on my Treo.
However, when I enabled GPRS (T-Mobile charges too much, and my Treo eats up my 1 MB, so I normally use dialup), I did not get what I expected.
I believe that GPRS is advertised as up to 56Kb of data, or 7 KBytes a second. Off the same 10 downloads, my average download speed was only 1241 bytes asecond. My min was 371 bytes and my Max was 2767.
This was only just barely 2x the speed of dialup, but it was at a much greater cost. Is it worth it? I will let you decide when you see the numbers. I also look forward to seeing what PCS Vision users get - When I had a PCS Vision PCMICIA card I was getting 2x the speed of 56K dialup, so it will be interesting to see if the Treo handles it well.
Please post your results on this issue, and thanks to Hexlet LLC for releasing this software!
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