XOHM roundup: WiMAX-enabled Aspire One, speed testing
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 9th 2008 9:26AM
posted Oct 9th 2008 9:26AM
Yesterday was a pretty big day for Sprint (along with a number of laptop manufacturers), as America's had its first major glimpse at widespread WiMAX. A few other tidbits lingering from the mayhem were the obligatory speed tests -- which were decidedly average -- and what's believed to be a prototype Aspire One with inbuilt WiMAX capabilities. Said netbook was residing within an Intel-branded van, and while it wasn't made clear if Acer had any plans of bringing such a beast to the commercial realm, the folks at Laptop found the WiMAX surfing to be respectable, but not mind-blowing, as the New York Times homepage took around 15 seconds to load completely. Mr. Dave Zatz was able to pull down around 4,600kbps (and 1,519kbps up) in an impromptu speed test, while Kevin over at jkOnTheRun only managed 3,435kbps down / 1,555kbps up. As always, YMMV.Read - Hands-on with WiMAX-enabled Aspire One
Read - XOHM Speed Test I
Read - XOHM Speed Test II
I can only afford to connect to the Internet once
if a computer was a super hero, it'd look like that
Woow!! This is what I call internet!! Flabbergasting speeds!!!!
What site did you use for speedtest...??
www.speedtest.net
As you can see in the screenshot...
Well technically it's on-screen but whatever.
Why did the NYT page take so long with such good data rates? Is the latency that bad? It takes less than 2 seconds on my 3Mbps DSL connection.
First picture says the ping is 82 ms (I can't make out the ping in the second one). Not super fantastic, but not bad.
Web pages shouldn't load slow because of that ping, so I suspect it's something other than latency (or very well could have been completely unrelated to the WiMax itself, or the ping times to the NYT servers could be much much higher, etc.).
However, 82ms ping is about as high as I would want to play a serious FPS on (say Team Fortress 2). I usually won't even connect to most servers unless the ping is < 50 ms.
Did anyone who signed up for the quality test in Baltimore ever hear back from them?
wow, I would say that's pretty fast.
Either result is faster than my 3 Mbps down/768 Kbps up DSL service from AT&T. The latency is pretty typical for a wireless network, since there's setup/signaling involved with transfers whereas on wired Ethernet, your link is set up when you first connect to the network.
These are some pretty good speeds. Hopefully they'll have this in mobile phones soon.
I'm using XOHM in the DC area.
So far I've been happy, I can't complain. I can deal with 3Mbps down on a consistent basis, I've seen speeds up to 6-7Mbps at times. In all honesty, its not that bad. :) Upload speeds the past two days have been around 1.5Mbps but I've seen it around 3Mbps up at times.
I'm ditching Comcast all together here shortly once XOHM 'officially' announces service for this area. Comcast's recent price hikes have put me over the edge with their TV service. I can get decent OTA HDTV / DTV and for the amount of TV I watch its fine with me. I can miss those few cable channels I watch here and there. Just not worth it, crazy paying $150/month for TV and Internet when I'm only one person.