Throughput of a Sierra Aircard 750

Throughput of a Sierra Aircard 750 SearchSearch
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Nicky Murphy
Posted on Friday, October 10, 2003 - 06:24 am:   

What sort of throughput in terms of SMS/MMS per minute can I expect from an Aircard 750 installed in a fast laptop?
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Posted on Friday, October 10, 2003 - 08:54 pm:   

Hi Nicky,

I wish I could provide a definitive answer to this question.

The reality is that the throughput is going to vary significantly between operators. I generally don't expect a rate of more than 6 to 10 SMS per minute over any type of GSM modem.

If your operator supports SMS over GPRS, and your modem supports SMS over GPRS, then you can frequently get a better speed. On phones that have this support, you can frequently set this option in a configuration menu.

I've never checked the Sierra Aircard to see if it supported this function. But your message got me thinking.

I checked, and the default setting for this modem is to send SMS messages via circuit-switched data instead of GPRS. (Many operators don't support SMS over GPRS or don't have it fully implemented, so this makes sense.)

So, I went into "Phone and Modem Options" in the Windows Control Panel ... and went into Properties for the modem driver for the Sierra Wireless Aircard. Under the "Advanced" menu, I added "AT+CGSMS=2" in the "Extra initialization commands" setting.

After making that configuration change, I was able to use NowSMS to send 30 SMS messages in 30 seconds, which is the fastest speed I've seen yet for this type of connection.

This does require that your network provider support SMS over GPRS in order to get this type of advanced speed.

On the MMS side of things, there are more factors that can influence speed. The size of the messages is one important factor. And the performance of the operator GPRS network, and their WAP gateway is another. We're still trying to get a handle on what type of speeds to expect here. On average, it seems that I'm seeing about 1KB/sec (8Kb/sec) on sending or receiving MMS messages, plus a few seconds of overhead (less overhead on the Sierra card because it doesn't have to perform mode switching). We're looking at ways that we can speed this MMS over GPRS transport in future releases, but I won't give away the secrets that we're planning for future releases yet ...

-bn
Arne Lovius
New member
Username: Arne_lovius

Post Number: 7
Registered: 01-2004
Posted on Saturday, February 21, 2004 - 07:35 pm:   

so if your just sending mms with an aircard, you should be able to come close to saturating the link (operator capabilities not withstanding).