On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

3G only

Ofcom tested two different types of speed test: an automated “network capability” speedtest conducted by well-known testing firm Epitiro, and a more real-world test with a panel of 1,179 consumers.

The Epitiro test was conducted using static probes from numerous sites dotted around the country (locations pictured below).

However, as Ofcom admits, those sites were cherry picked, with only those offering the best 3G/HSPA speeds across all five networks making the cut. “More than 160 of the 600 candidate sites were surveyed to determine what coverage of 3G/HSPA services were provided by each of the five MNOs [networks],” Ofcom’s report states. “Sites where good 3G/HSPA coverage was available for the majority of MNOs were prioritised for deployment of probes.”

Not surprisingly, therefore, the overall average speed recorded by the static probes – 2.1Mbits/sec – is considerably higher than the average speed recorded by the consumer panel – 1.5 Mbits/sec – which includes both 2G and 3G speeds.

Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, Ofcom has chosen only to publish network-specific average speeds using the artificial Epitiro tests, and not the real-world consumer tests.

Download tests

Ofcom/Epitiro didn’t only cherry pick the download sites – the test they used to measure download speeds also gives a highly unrealistic measure of performance.

Before I go any further, let’s all put our cards on the table: any type of benchmark, be it the PC Pro Real World Benchmarks or Ofcom’s mobile broadband tests, all involve a degree of artificiality. Benchmarks are designed to test the relative performance of one product/company against another using pre-determined metrics – they’re not necessarily indicative of actual consumer experience.

That said, the methodology used by Ofcom/Epitiro to measure web page download time is so far removed from the real-world experience as to be almost worthless, in my opinion.

“The webpage download test involved measuring the time taken to download the HTML ‘skeleton’ of three popular UK websites,” Ofcom’s report states. “The time taken to download the associated media assets, such as images and graphics were not included.”

Consequently, Ofcom admits that “the web page download times measured may be significantly faster than the time it would take to download a full web page with all images”. You don’t say.

Ofcom claims it would take an O2 customer an average of 1.5 seconds to download a web page – I’ve never seen page-loading times as fast as that on any mobile broadband network. In fact, you’re lucky to see those kinds of speeds on ADSL.

Image compression

Ofcom claims one of the reasons it decided to omit images from its tests is because some networks compress website images, while others download full-resolution photos, potentially skewing the results. A fair point.

The two networks that compress images – O2 and T-Mobile – come first and third respectively in Ofcom’s webpage download tests.

Yet, in my experience, the networks that compress images usually offer the worst page-load times, as the process of compressing the image on their own proxy server often takes longer than downloading the full-res image. In fact, image compression is usually the first thing I switch off (if the network even lets you).

So, by failing to take into account the bulk of page content (images are obviously far more data intensive than text) and the potential impact of image compression, Ofcom’s page download times should really be taken with an enormous pinch of condiments.

Worthless tests?

Does that mean Ofcom’s entire mobile broadband tests are baseless? Absolutely not. They are highly detailed tests, with a lot of very useful information in there for people considering a mobile broadband contract.

However, if you think you’re likely to regularly get 3Mbits/sec and page download times of 1.5 seconds, I suggest you’re sorely mistaken.

Step forward David Bayon and Darien Graham-Smith, who claimed that T-Mobile’s decision (now partially reversed) to cut “fair use” data caps to 500MB was essentially “fair” – it was just the way T-Mobile presented it that was the problem.

Sorry chaps, but you’re wrong. Hideously, grossly, sleep-with-your-wife’s-mother-behind-her-back wrong.

T-Mobile’s argument – partially supported by the PC Pro Two, as they shall henceforth be known – is that anything more bandwidth-chomping than basic browsing should be performed on a Wi-Fi connection.

Let me remind all concerned that these are mobile phones – the word makes up 75% of T-Mobile’s name for God’s sake. If I only wanted to watch video, use Spotify, download a podcast or upload photos when I was within spitting distance of a Wi-Fi network, I wouldn’t bother with a sodding smartphone. I’d use my laptop – it’s far better for all those jobs.

I paid a couple of hundred quid for an iPhone and thirty-odd quid a month to my network precisely to enjoy the multimedia benefits the smartphone brings. If all I wanted was to make calls, read email, and browser the occasional webpage, I could do it on a Nokia No-Name 8700 on a £10 a month tariff.

The mobile networks have sold us these all-singing, all-dancing smartphones, weaned us on to expensive all-inclusive monthly tariffs, and now want to take away the free drinks. And not even in an up-front way, but in a sneaky change the Ts&Cs and hope they don’t notice way.

Perhaps if T-Mobile et al spent a little less on ridiculous, celebrity-filled TV adverts telling us “life is for sharing” and invested more money in a network that was actually fit for sharing, it wouldn’t have to trim its “fair-use” policy in the first place.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

Mr Graham used this revelation to repeat his calls for “deterrent custodial sentences” to “stop the trade in unlawful personal information”. What he wasn’t prepared to do, however, was name the network involved – the very company who had a legal duty to protect its customers’ data. “We are preparing a prosecution case, and it would obviously prejudice a prosecution,” said a spokesperson, when asked why the ICO had taken a sudden vow of silence.

Of course, it took us no longer than two or three hours to work out who the guilty party was. Britain only has five major mobile networks – once we’d got the blanket denials from the other four, T-Mobile had little choice but to release a confession, issuing a mightily ironic riposte to the Information Commissioner for breaching its confidentiality in the process.

No-one’s disputing the fact that the real villains here were the members of staff who stole the data and sold it to the brokers – indeed, in some respects, T-Mobile was as much a victim as the people who had their details pilfered. But something was inherently wrong with an IT system that allowed employees to steal thousands of customer records and seemingly go undetected for months.  And there’s something even more wrong with an Information Commissioner that pledges to “promote openness by public bodies” and then tries to hide the identity of companies who fail to protect their customers’ data.  Not to mention the fact he’s now given T-Mobile’s lawyers a cast iron defence should any prosecution actually materialise (“The case has been prejudiced, m’lud”).

Abject ad watchdog

The Information Commissioner isn’t the only watchdog you can barely hear bark, let alone see it bite. Take the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I’ve lamented its abysmal failure to clamp down on the worst excesses of broadband providers in the past – ads for “unlimited broadband” that have strictly defined limits, for instance.

Yet, its ineffectiveness reached new lows in a recent adjudication against Vodafone. The ASA upheld a complaint made against adverts claiming the network had “abolished” its roaming charges, when in fact Vodafone had merely postponed the charges for a few months. (Vodafone, incidentally, made a valiant attempt to redefine the word “abolished” in its defence to the ASA, the comical details of which you can read here.)

Being a summer campaign, Vodafone stopped running the adverts at the end of August. The ASA issued its adjudication on 28 October. The sanction? “The ads must not appear again in their current form.” Bravo.

The ASA has a staff budget of more than £5 million, according to its most recent annual report. Yet it takes an average of 66 days to resolve complaints that require investigation. Even if an industry-funded body is never going to dish out fines to the companies that pay its way, is it really too much to ask for it to deal with complaints more promptly?

Ofcom go-slow

Then again, when it comes to quick responses, we should all bow to the undisputed procrastination masters, Ofcom. Back in 2007, Ofcom told mobile phone networks they would have to transfer customers’ numbers from one network to another within two hours by September this year.  However, Ofcom’s plans were waylaid when the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) ruled that it had had got its sums wrong over the cost of implementing such measures. Ofcom said it would cost £5m, Vodafone successfully argued it would cost closer to £37m, so it was only out by a factor of seven or eight.

Now Ofcom has had to start the whole tedious process from scratch, and says it “aims to have any new porting process arrangements in place during 2011”. (“These things take time,” an Ofcom spokesperson told me.)  Oh, and instead of two hours, it’s now considering watering down the transfer time to one working day.

With watchdogs like these, who needs enemies?

As you’ll probably know by now, unless you’ve been living in a particularly dark and damp cave over the past few months and weeks, the T-Mobile G1 is the first handset to sport Google’s Android mobile operating system. And, after a brief tete-a-tete with the phone this morning, we’re ready to report our first impressions. So how does it stack up?

The software

Android has been designed primarily to rival the iPhone’s touchscreen interface and first impressions are that it does a good job. On the G1’s 3.2in 320 x 480 pixel screen, all the menu options and interface baubles are large and finger-sized, and move around with iPhone-like momentum animations.

The home screen consists of a Clock display occupying the main part of the screen and a list of icons for launching applications resides below. Running along the top of the screen is a thin status notifications bar, which can be dragged down and up when needed – new emails, missed calls and download progress are all listed here. At the bottom, a pop-up menu bar can be launched with finger buttons for launching further applications.

Swipe your finger sideways and more application launchers appear. Web browsing is provided by a Google Chrome-lookalike mobile browser and it’s pretty effective. During the brief period I had with it I managed to view our very own PC Pro website, the BBC home page and I logged into Zoho Writer successfully and made a quick document edit. Impressive, but there’s no Flash support as yet.

It renders web pages in full and panning around is as graceful as it is on the iPhone – you just touch your finger to the screen and drag pages around. Zooming in and out is easy, either via an ingenious magnifying glass mode, or through the use of simple zoom in and out controls. There’s also a recent pages view, which displays a kind of history in a scrollable grid, and you can also have several pages open simultaneously. All of this is pretty responsive, but there’s nothing to match the pinch zoom in and out control you get on the iPhone.

For email, the phone supports what’s akin to push email on Gmail accounts. It synchronised with your email constantly in the background and notifies you whenever new messages arrive. You can also set it up with other POP3 and IMAP accounts, but T-Mobile was unable to confirm whether or not this ‘push’ feature would work with non-Gmail services.

What’s neat here is that the phone sychronises over the air not only with Gmail, but also Google Calendar, and Contacts, meaning you not only have instant access to your phone numbers but also everyone you’ve ever sent an email to using your Gmail accout. Other Google tools on the phone include Talk for IM (VoIP isn’t enabled) and Maps. There’s also a YouTube application.

Extra software can be accessed via the Android Market and, to showcase this open-source application resource, our sample G1 had a few interesting tools preinstalled. One was a frivolous way of showing off the phone’s accelerometer, another showcased the built-in digital compass and a third used the 3.2-megapixel camera to capture barcodes and run quick price comparisons online.

What isn’t so clever is that there’s no way to create and edit documents or even view basic attachments such as PDF and .doc files. Surprisingly, the full version of Google Docs didn’t appear to be supported – I got a message saying the browser wasn’t supported when I tried to log into my account. And you won’t be able to sync with Outlook either. For that sort of functionality you’ll have to wait and see what the Android Market – Google’s rather more open equivalent of the iPhone’s App Store – brings.

The hardware

The G1 didn’t look like much when I saw the first grainy videos of the device, and when we got the chance to play with it I wan’t any more impressed. It’s fat at 17.1mm, and its plastic, rubberised finish is nowhere near as alluring as the iPhone’s glossy, shiny Magpie-tempting piece of technological jewellery.

In fact, whatever colour you go for – T-Mobile demonstrated all black and all white models – I’d go so far as to say that it’s downright ugly, and the slightly angled button bar at the bottom of the screen doesn’t help. That’s surprising for a phone so firmly targeted at consumers.

What’s also surprising is that there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack – audio is piped out via a mini-USB socket. This is madness for a handset pitched as a rival to the iPhone.

Nonetheless, once I’d had a play with it, I found it a practical enough. The screen slides up, out and to the right with a pleasingly solid action and the five row keyboard underneath is very easy to get used to. It reminds me of the keyboard on the old Sidekick with its rounded buttons – a much underrated messaging phone.

It’s a busier-looking device than the iPhone, too. Below the screen is a row of physical controls: there are two buttons for starting and ending calls, two for back and home keys, plus another for popping up the context-sensitive menu. Interestingly there’s also a BlackBerry-esque clickable trackball, which worked really well – a snappy alternative for navigating fiddly web forms.

And inside the G1, there’s all of the hardware you’d expect from an HTC-manufactured device. You get fast mobile broadband in the shape of HSDPA, Wi-Fi for use with hotspots or at home, GPS, an accelerometer and a digital compass – the first time I’ve seen this feature in a phone. The battery life from the phone’s 1,150mAh lithium ion cell is a claimed 130 hours for standby and five hours talktime and storage comes courtesy of a 2MB microSD card that’s included in the box with the phone.

Time to buy?

The G1 is due to hit the shops in November, and T-Mobile will initially be offering it for free on a £40 contract with unlimited (subject, of course, to fair use policy) web access. But to be honest, I wonder how many people will take them up on this offer when an iPhone can be had for £100 on a £35 per month contract.

Because, despite the hype and the excitment, I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed by the G1. Though it’s a practical device that seems to work pretty well, and the operating system looks promising, I can’t shake the feeling that Google’s Android deserved a whole lot more.

Until yesterday, T-Mobile had provided us with the larger Huawei E220 USB modem you can see at the top of the photo here. And to be honest, it was pretty ropey. Tim Danton described last week the trouble he had installing the device and the download speeds we recorded – even when sat upon the 6th floor balcony here at Dennis Towers – were distinctly underwhelming. Speeds were typically hovering around 300-400Kb/sec, placing T-Mobile well behind rivals such as Vodafone and 3.

Then we spotted that the company had released a new Huawei USB stick (dubbed web’n'walk Stick III) that plugs straight into the PC – near identical hardware to that used by Vodafone and 3, in fact. We badgered T-Mobile’s press office to send us a test unit and the results have been nothing short of remarkable. Download speeds are now hovering around 2Mb/sec – around five times faster than what we were getting with the E220 modem. Even on my train journey from Sussex to London the connection is reasonably solid, whereas before it was decidedly choppy.

If you’re thinking of signing up for T-Mobile’s mobile broadband, make sure you opt for the Stick III rather than the E220. If you’re still not sure what mobile broadband network to hook up with, make sure you read issue 166 of PC Pro, on sale 19 June, where you can find out how all five of the UK networks compare.