Why is Vodafone Live on 3G so slow?

Why is Vodafone Live on 3G so slow? SearchSearch
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Anonymous
 
Posted on Tuesday, December 07, 2004 - 12:56 pm:   

Admittedly, I am not an expert on 3G or WAP technology. I seem to know only enough to be dangerous.

I recently purchased a SonyEricsson V800 on the Vodafone Live 3G service in the UK.

It's a nice phone. However my initial impression of the Vodafone Live 3G service is that it is painfully slow. It takes 10 to 15 seconds to load any of the links from the Vodafone Live home page.

If it weren't for the colour pictures, I'd swear that I had travelled back in time, and was back on my Nokia 7110. Although, come to think of it, the 7110 was faster, even if it was operating over circuit switched data at 9600 bps.

Disillusioned, I decided to try using the phone as a modem over Bluetooth. Wow! Performance is better than I expected. On several download tests, I was receiving data at 40KB/sec, which works out to 320Kbps or 400Kbps depending on how you want to apply the KBps to Kbps conversion.

If the phone is so fast as a modem, why is Vodafone Live so painful to use?

Perhaps the Vodafone Live portal is just slow?

No, it seems to be more basic than that.

I spend more of my time on the phone's browser reading my e-mail and connecting to news and info sites that are outside of the operator portal. I really don't care about the content on Vodafone Live or O2 Active, and spend most of my time accessing my own bookmarks. But waiting between 5 and 15 seconds for simple pages to load every time I select a link is too painful.

So, a friend of mine sent me to your web site, and told me that I should install my own WAP gateway.

This seemed a rather odd idea, but here I am.

I configured a profile on my phone to connect to the internet APN, and use my installation of Now WAP as the gateway. Now I'm getting decent performance ... 1 to 2 seconds per click is so much more usable than the 5 to 15 second pauses.

Of course, I can't access the Vodafone Live content, because that is behind a firewall. Oddly, if I try to go to the link for Vodafone Live (live.vodafone.com), it tells me "If you can see this, it means that the installation of the Apache web server software on this system was successful. You may now add content to this directory and replace this page." If only Vodafone would replace their crap WAP gateway.

This brings me to the reason for my post here. I'm just an individual user. I just need a one user license for Now WAP. I'm happy to pay for it, but your licensing seems oriented toward service providers and just isn't in my budget.

Please help.

Sign me,

Baffled in Basingstoke