Preferring 3G over DSL – But The Channel Has Become Quite Busy

Last year I bought a prepaid SIM card in Austria with unlimited Internet access for 18 euros a month. It's done me a great service and has done so again recently when I was staying in Austria for a few weeks again. The place I was staying had a 5 Mbit/s DSL line but I nevertheless preferred to use the 3G connectivity instead.

You might wonder why but there's a simple reason: The uplink! While the DSL line only provided a few hundred kilobits per second, I could upload my documents at almost 10 times the speed over 3G, i.e. around 3 Mbit/s.

But things were getting quite tight over the air. In the early morning hours I could easily achieve the 10 Mbit/s in the downlink direction which was the subscribed limit. During daytime and in the evening, however, I could only get around 2-3 Mbit/s, despite the dual-carrier configuration of the 3G base station. In other words, things are getting quite busy. Time for LTE to arrive in the Austrian country side.