circle.ch :: GPRS upload transmission performance

circle.ch weblog by Urs Gehrig

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2010-09-09T12:29:59

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23. July 2003

GPRS upload transmission performance
Technology (wiki) - urs @ 14:31:00

Roger and myself were discussing differences in the transmission rate using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) [1]. While my Ericsson T68 takes about one minute to upload an image of the size 320x240 - approx. 15kB to 20kB - Roger only had a bit more than a minute with an image sized 640x480 at about 50kB to 60kB [2]. Roger uses a Nokia 3650. So based on those values I reflected on the reasons for tha latency of my phone. An image at the size of 50kB lasts about four minutes to upload with my current setup. So, what are the reasons for such enormous differencies?

a) The Phones (Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola etc. )
b) The Transmission Standard (GPRS, HSCSD etc. )
c) The Telcos (Swisscom, Sunrise, Orange et.al. )

Roger does not have the same Telco as I have; so my first thought was, that it is simply a question of the provider. Your experiences, facts and comments on that topic are kindly welcome.

[1] http://www.cs.hut.fi/~hhk/GPRS/gprs_index.html
[2] http://blog.bitflux.ch/p1182.html

Update:
Chregu pointed me to a posting [3] where it is stated, that the down- and upload performance actually depends on the phone. That is still not satisfactory since the weak upload rate is at about 12 kbps (about 1.5kB/s ) which is still five times higher than the rate the T68 reaches (20kB/60s is approx. 0.33kB/s). Maybe it is too hot for maths these days.

Furthermore attached images will be usually encoded by base64 and therefore increase the size by about 30%; this of course for both the phones.

[3] http: //groups.google.ch/groups?q=max+kb/s+gprs