DiGi 3G Performance

Yes. If you don't know, now you can get 3G or HSDPA from DiGi right from your mobile phone, you don't need an USB dongle like those mobile broadband service. You can now make video call if the receiving party also has 3G enabled on his/her phone with video call feature. But make sure you are not bare naked when making call. Hehe...

After some glitches switching from DiGi EDGE unlimited to 3G unlimited, I guess it's time to find out the new 3G performance.

I performed some tests over Maxis 3G and DiGi EDGE previously, perhaps that can be used as reference. This time I did the test differently, I referred the coverage map in both ISP's site...

Coverage map of Maxis and DiGi respectively. I am subscriber for both but not Celcom, so no Celcom in this test. The only thing was I couldn't find a spot to have good signal strength for both, so I ran the test in 2 different places where I could get constant signal strength ...

Full bar on DiGi 3G network. And for consistency, I ran the test using speedtest.net. Here's the result...

Wow! Impressive! With an announced average speed of 700kbps download and 200kbps upload on the website, this result certainly is outstanding!

I then went to youtube...

I did not press the pause button at all. Clearly you can see that the playback bar was far behind the buffer bar, it couldn't beat it like MJ's MTV. Hehe...

I simply tried a download from a local server...

MFM map download from its main server with average of 120kbps download speed. Fast, no?

Move on to another test. I could not get full bar on Maxis 3G, the best spot I could get was only constant 4 bars...

And the result...

Very disappointing result. But it matched with my recent experience. I have been using Maxis 3G day to day and the speed is really touching my nerve since few months ago. From a good result to this result, the service is really degrading these days. Not only that, if you are Maxis 3G user like me, you may experience this...

Whenever I attempt to logon to Maxis 3G, I stuck at this screen for minutes before it eventually lets me connect. Sigh. Anyhow, I tried youtube streaming like what I did for DiGi 3G above...

As expected, bad result. This time the playback bar beat the buffer. You can see the playback overlays the buffer bar. I could not stream instantly because the buffering was so slow, I had to pause until the entire content was fully buffered before I could have a smooth play.

In short, you can see yourself the performance of new DiGi 3G service. The test may not statistically prove, benchmark and rank an ISP, but from a consumer like me, I just want to get connected whenever I need and I could get decent speed that makes me feel worth paying the monthly fee. You can also see the rating in the result above. That's not my rating but a collective rating from speedtest.net users to respective ISPs. Perhaps that could be another supplement fact to my result above.

Performance aside. One commonality all ISPs have is they don't extend their 3G coverage to my hometown. Sigh. But when I viewed the coverage I was happy that DiGi 3G covers the area that I will hang out often in the near future...

It's one of the 3G areas closest to Klang. So I ran the test again...

Consistent result. It looks promising. But it's still new, we shall see when the subscriber base grows bigger.