Dual-Carrier HSPA+: 30 MBit/s and Counting

Back in June 2011 I ran some speed tests at home in Cologne to see where my 64QAM capable HSDPA category 14 stick would take me in terms of downlink performance. The result was 16 MBit/s which went far beyond the already breathtaking 11 MBit/s I measured the year before when the higher order modulation was not yet switched on. In the meantime, dual-carrier HSPA has been activated which can bundle two 5 MHz downlink carriers. And with a HSDPA category 24 device I've reached my next personal HSDPA downlink speed record of 3.7 MB/s, which translates to 30 MBit/s. And this time I didn't run the test over night but in the morning at 7 a.m., so one can assume there was already a little bit of network load from all those people with smartphones going to work. When running the same test during the day I still get data rates well over 20 MBit/s. Have a look on the picture on the left for the details. Previously I usually used files to download that were a couple of hundred megabytes in size. At speeds like this however, they are downloaded much too quickly so I finally switched to 4 GB DVD images. That says something all by itself, too.