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Ateneo Innovation Center Reports Wireless Broadband Quality of Service of Different Carriers With the increased demand for

wireless Internet services in the Philippines, the three major carriers have offered broadband services based on 3G Internet access. Consumers purchase a specialized dongle that plugs into a USB port, and if the marketing promises speeds are true, they should be able to cruise the Internet at 1.4 M bit/sec. Do they actually deliver on these promises of high speed Wireless Broadband Access? The Ateneo Innovation Center reports the Quality of Service (QoS) performance is far below the marketing hype for all the carriers. The Ateneo Innovation Center did a comparative study of the QoS using the USB dongles obtained from each carrier for 3G Internet services. Interestingly all the carriers have dongles made by the same vendor. The QoS will depend on the available 3G-service bandwidth at the specific location and the intensity of the other traffic going through the carriers base station (SMS, MMS, voice calls, and Internet services.) The research studied different scenarios of deployment and different upload and download traffic. An Industry-standard speed tester (DU Meter 5.0 by Hagel Technologies Ltd) characterized the upload and download speeds for the different scenarios. The tests were limited to the performance of pre-paid subscription. Different scenarios have been studied in the complete report: On campus with students in and out of class, Ateneo championship basketball game, Christmas and New Years Day, and off-peak hours Megamall access. Identical laptops and identical data services were used for simultaneous access. While the promise of the carriers is an access speed in excess of 1 M bit/sec, for the many scenarios tested 250 k bit/sec is the average performance level of the carriers. As an example, shown in the Figure below are the results obtained for all carriers (labeled X, Y, and Z here) taken in SM Megamall on Monday, February 7, 2011, from 2-4 pm. The testing method involves the simultaneous uploading (109MB) and downloading (700MB) from common information sources.

Figure 1 The Upload speed measured at SM Megamall during off hours. A simultaneous download of a torrent video was done simultaneously. Notice that Carrier X has a cap on the access upload speed of 350 k bit/sec. Carriers Y and Z exhibit variable speed with an average less than 200 k bit/sec.

Overnight (Feb 5-6, 2011) measurements of QoS were expected to provide the best possible data performance, since the overall network traffic should be low. The performance comparison was studied for peak and off-peak hours of mobile broadband in Ateneo, one from 9:00 pm until 12:00 pm, the second from 2:00 am until 5:00 am. These two situations were chosen because the mobile broadband traffic is very high between the hours of 9:00pm and 11:00pm and low between 2:00am and 4:00am. In Table 1 below, we show the comparison of the average Upload (UL) and Download (DL) speeds of each of the carriers for the peak and off-peak hour testing taken on the Ateneo campus. Table 1 Speeds of all three carriers for peak and off-peak testing. Average DL Average DL Average UL Average UL Speed (kbps) Speed (kbps) Speed (kbps) Speed (kbps) (Peak) (Off-Peak) (Peak) (Off-Peak) 260.58 762.47 41.98 68.44 Carrier X 160.16 20.41 20.7 5.34 Carrier Y 266.24 607.89 30.77 110.65 Carrier Z Off-peak performance can be up to 700 K bit/sec for one of the carriers, but the Peak performance is clearly less than 300 K bit/sec for all the carriers. This actual performance is over 75 % less than that promised by marketing hype. Moreover during Christmas and New Years days the carriers struggled to provide even 100K bit/sec service.

The complete results have been presented to both the Congressional Commission on Science, Technology and Engineering (COMSTE) and the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), with both government bodies encouraging the Ateneo researchers to continue their consumer-oriented QoS tests in the future.

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