GPRS struggling for speed and visibility, says Ascom expert
By Ray Le Maistre, Total Telecom, in Cannes
22 February 2001
Reality is failing to match the hype in live GPRS networks, with data speeds often
failing to exceed those achieved by 2G networks, according to Raymond Wu,
product manager at Swiss test and measurement specialist Ascom.
In the equivalent of a real live situation, where an operator would allocate one time
slot for a user's GPRS connection, "the speeds are often no better than those for
GSM. It would not be much faster than 9.6 kilobits per second," Wu told Total
Telecom at the 3GSM Congress in Cannes.
And Wu should know – he has extensive experience of testing GPRS networks for
carriers and vendors and his experience suggests that there is a great deal of work
to be done yet before high-speed data services will be rolled out en masse with any
degree of quality of service. "In many existing GPRS networks the connectivity
simply disappears from time to time, and when that happens there is no way at
present of the operators knowing about it. The better networks can be recovered
within hours, but some are very difficult to get back at all," revealed Wu.
He also told Total Telecom that the pricing strategies for GPRS services are wildly
disparate. "For exactly the same service I have seen one operator preparing to
charge 10 times more than another operator. They are very unsure as to how to
position themselves to sell the services and recoup the money lost from the voice
time slots given over to GPRS data," said Wu.
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