Community Matters

I have a Motorola Ming and occasionally use it as wireless modem for my MacBook Pro. If you look around, most people will tell you that GPRS gets you 28-64kbit/s with 56kbit/s being the value typically quoted. This isn’t very fast (standard analog modem speed) but should be good enough for occasional use. Yet, almost every time I try I am very disappointed with the transfer speed (and yes, my 7Mbit/s link at home most likely spoiled me).

Doing some more reading on GPRS finally helped me understand why theory and reality appear so far apart. It turns out that GPRS throughput degrades dramatically with distance to the transmission tower. Coverage drops down to 25% if the transmission tower enables the faster transmission schemes. So unless you happen to sit close to the next antenna, forget reaching decent speeds

Too bad the Ming doesn’t support EDGE. There are some rumors that the hardware is capable of doing so and that it is just not enabled in the software, but so far no one has been able to confirm that.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?