As a frequent traveler I often use Vodafone Germany’s Websession offer which lets me connect wirelessly to the Internet in most countries in Europe and also in some countries overseas using 3G UMTS or 3.5G HSDPA. I’ve first reported about the details of the offer here and also posted reports of how well it performs in Italy, France and Switzerland in the meantime. This blog entry takes a look at how the offer performs in Austria:
A1’s 3G network (Mobilikom) coverage area throughout Austria is excellent and even in areas without 3G coverage, EDGE capable GSM base stations deliver throughput good enough for work and play. While in 3.5G HSDPA coverage, I reached top speeds of about 2 MBit/s when downloading three files simultaneously.
Single file download top speeds where at about 800 kbit/s. As in previous cases I am still a bit puzzled to why that happens as round trip delay time for the file download was around 230 ms. Together with a TCP window size of 65k, the throughput of a single TCP session should be 2.2 MBit/s. Note: For background information on the effect of the TCP window size and round trip delay times on throughput see here.
Nevertheless, 800 kbit/s per file is more than what I observed in Italy and France where bandwidth is throttled to around 500 kbit/s overall, independently of how many files are downloaded at the same time. Looks like Vodafone A1 does something differently with Vodafone Germany then the roaming partners in Italy (Vodafone Italy) and France (SFR).
So all things taken together the Websession performance in Austria is quite convincing, too.