Vodafone admits over-egging mobile broadband speeds

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 20 Mar 2009 at 15:30

Vodafone has admitted its website over-exaggerates the speed of its mobile broadband network, after being challenged by rival T-Mobile.

T-Mobile advertises mobile broadband speeds of 4.5Mbits/sec, even though its network is theoretically capable of 7.2Mbits/sec. Others, such as Vodafone, advertise the higher speed.

"7.2Mbit/sec is the technical standard," Richard Warmsley, head of internet and entertainment at T-Mobile told PC Pro. "With the [mobile broadband] dongles that are on the market today, across all the networks, to my knowledge the maximum [speed] that's been achieved is 4.5Mbits/sec."

When asked whether he felt rival networks were hoodwinking customers with claims of connection speeds of up to 7.2Mbits/sec, he replied: "We've yet to find that as a real experience anywhere."

A spokesperson for Vodafone said the company had changed its advertising to reflect the actual speeds that customers are likely to achieve. "Since things have gone mass market, communication has changed," she said. "We talk much less now about theoretical speeds but the real speeds customers are likely to get, and that's somewhere between 1Mbits/sec and 5Mbits/sec."

Asked on Friday afternoon why the company was still advertising speeds of up to 7.2Mbits/sec from its website, the spokesperson said: "Talk of getting up to 7.2Mbits/sec is strictly true, but from actually guiding the customer in a responsible manner, that's not something I thought we were doing any more and I'm surprised to see that on the front page, so I'm going to go and have a word now [with the marketing team]." The website remains unchanged this morning.

The Vodafone spokesman admitted that real-world users would never see the advertised maximum. "It is 7.2Mbits/sec technology," she said in defence of the company's advertising.

"If the site wasn't busy and all the other dependables were bang on, in a test environment that's the maximum speed that technology will provide you. On average it's between 1Mbit/sec and 5Mbits/sec."