Indosat has made a lot of improvements in their 3G area coverage as well as the quality of service it provides to its 3G users in the last 2 weeks, since my last post about 3G on the Road. The Indosat 3G signal strength in different areas becomes better, including areas far from the center of the city. The following pictures show the 3G availability from Meruya, the west part of Jakarta to Pulo Gadung, the east part of Jakarta.
The green areas around Taman Ria Senayan and Simprug on the picture are now become blue already. Even in Meruya and Joglo, the 3G signal is available with acceptable signal strength. Below is the latest picture taken 10 days later for Joglo, Permata Hijau, Senayan, Pejompongan and Setia Budi. They are all in blue now.
As explained in my previous post in this topic, the green color means that the datacard operates in 2G (GPRS) mode and blue color means it operates in the preferred 3G mode of operation.
A closer look on the area in front of Carrefour Cempaka Putih, gives a better view of the signal strength.
3G at the Office
What about the signal strength reception inside a building? It has been improved also. Two weeks a go, I had to use a 5 meter long USB repeater/extender from my notebook on my desk to connect to the the datacard I put on a window. It helps improving the signal strength and the quality of the connection. Now I don't need it anymore, connecting the datacard directly to my notebook on my desk, I have a good 4 bar signal strength with a stable connection without using the USB repeater. Look at the right side of the picture below. Mobile connect is an application that comes with the Huawei datacard. It provides information about the mode of operation, it can be GPRS, UMTS or HSDPA, the signal strength, the top transfer rate and the current transfer rate in bits per second.
What about the quality of the connection?. To satisfy my curiosity I measured the real connection speed by downloading around 660 Mb of ISO Image from an FTP site abroad, and it is amazing. The average transfer rate is 45Kbyte/sec. I got the ISO image within 4 hours and 15 minutes. You may ask, if you could download more than 1 Giga Byte of data in a day at the office, how much quota do need for a month?.
That's about the downstream speed, what about the upstream? how high can we go? I have tried this also by uploading about a file of 50MB size to a remote FTP server. The average speed is around 6 Kbytes/sec.
Never had a dial-up connection at this speed with this stability. I am very satisfied.
What's next?
I have used Indosat 3G only for data communication using datacard, and until now I am very satisfied with the performance. I have no experiences yet using the 3G for any other purpose like voice or video streaming, but with the average speed of 45 Kbps/sec, there are a lot of possibilities open for any kind of applications.
What kind of applications do you think that will become the killer application for the coming 3G era?
How much monthly quota will you need for your self? How much do you want pay for the service?