Apple has implemented in the new iPhone 4S a more powerful baseband chip, capable of reaching higher speeds while surfing the Internet. Although it was rumored that we will be able to surf the Internet at speeds of up to 21.6 Mbps, in reality the iPhone 4S allows surfing at speeds of 14.4 Mbps and I think that is more than enough for Romania. In the images above you can see some tests I did this morning on my own Orange subscription card. The mobile internet option in the subscription allows me to surf at speeds up to 21.6 Mbps, but in Romania I managed to reach 9.17 Mbps on the iPhone 4S for now. All the tests were done using the SpeedTest application and only on the Timisoara and Bucharest servers, but the one in Timisoara gave the best results. The tests were done in Bucharest where Orange theoretically has the networks that allow users to surf at speeds up to 43 Mbps.
The pictures above show the tests done by me using a DigiNet Mobil card that I had at home and I was very surprised to find that the iPhone 4S is able to reach speeds of 7.8 Mbits. Using the RDS stick, I never exceeded 3 Mbits, but now I see that the speed is more than double, practically reaching the maximum value offered by the RDS subscription. Unfortunately, I don't have Vodafone/Cosmote cards with active internet on them, but if the representatives of the two companies would offer each a card for testing, I would be happy to make a similar comparison.
The speeds reached by the iPhone 4S translate as follows:
- 9.17 Mbits = ˜1.2 MB/second, that is, download a 700MB movie in just over 9 minutes.
- 7.87 Mbits = ˜0.98 MB/second, that is, download a 700 MB movie in just over 11 minutes.
Of course, to reach such speeds you must have internet options that are not limited to 3.6 or 7.2 Mbits and probably few of you will get similar results at home. I tried to do the tests at hours when the traffic in the GSM data networks is minimal to see what is the maximum speed I can reach. If you repeat the tests at the time of publication of this article or during the evening, you may have much weaker results.
