Hi all,

I've worked on GPRS network infrastructure and have some comments that might help check the bandwidth you're getting.

The performance is related to all the things you would expect like RF coverage and all the forms of interference. But it is also very dependent on the traffic profile. The protocols are not great at supporting intermittent data as there is a reasonable overhead in establishing a GPRS radio link (temporary block flow) and getting the coding scheme adjusted to give an optimum throughput.

Therefore there's a good chance that just browsing the web will give a poor throughput (other reasons aside) depending on the page content. If you have a data kit or PCMCIA card, try using a PC to FTP/HTTP a large file or download some streaming media.

With our kit, we find variations from 30 - 70+ kbit/s depending on traffic pattern.

Also, GPRS is *very* phone dependent. We can achieve 70+ kbit/s on a Sierra Wireless PCMCIA card (highly recommended) while we can crash a Sagem (battery out to recover) by sending it >~40kbit/s.

You may also be interested to know, there is an operator in the States (OK, perhaps bad example as GSM/GPRS usage is a lot lower than here but...) that has a single 64Kbit/s link for about 1/3 of the country...