Here I am, back in Italy and again using my 3 UK SIM for Internet access, since there are no data roaming charges between 3 networks in different countries. Very interesting and also a bit depressing to see the performance throughout the day. Sunday morninig 8 am seems to be a pretty quiet time and I easily got 1.5 MBit/s in downlink. Evenings seem to be high time, with data rates dropping to less than 300 kbit/s and long page loading times due to lots of lost packets. I am pretty sure it’s not a cell overload since the Wind UMTS network at the same locations easily gives me 1 MBit/s and no packet loss in direct comparison. So the bottleneck is either the link back to the home network or the GGSN in the UK .
While it’s good to see the networks being used and affordable data roaming in place, I’d appreciate sufficient capacity in the core network.
Hi,
It’s not about the capacity in the core network itself, but probably the bottleneck is in the interconnection between the core networks of the roaming partners(as you say the way back to the GGSN).
The GRX capacity is still very expensive and in my opinion this is the main reason for the high price of data roaming. As 3 networks don’t extra charge in roaming, it’s possible that they use GRX lines with relatively small capacity and this reflects on the quality, providing best effort data roaming service.
KR/Bozhidar