Dewayne Hendricks tested the Wi-Fi service at the Powell Street BART station on Saturday, 7 February 2009. The service is run by Wi-Fi Rail. He used the iPhone iNetworkTest application. He also tested the speed and latency of AT&T’s 3G network and his Comcast home cable Internet service to see how they compare against Wi-Fi Rail’s service.
Here are his findings:
(1) Wi-Fi at Powell Street, San Francisco BART station
Speed: 5343.062 Kbps
Latency: 51.99 ms
(2) AT&T 3G network on the way to the Powell Street station
Speed: 1283.610 Kbps
Latency: 178.23 ms
(3) Comcast at Dewayne’s house in Fremont, Californnia
Speed: 4755.447 Kbps
Latency: 81.86 ms
It appears that Wi-Fi Rail is delivering the 5 Mbps throughput that they’re claiming. They are also beating Comcast. Dewayne did not have any problems logging into the service. All in all, a pleasant experience, according to him.
Please re-run your tests with a laptop that can actually handle the throughput of a speed test. The iphone is not an accurate test tool despite what the speedtest app may have you believe.
Actually … for a quick casual test it is not that bad. I have calibrated this test against a laptop running Chariot and within 20% it is just fine.
A few other thoughts.
1. I rather prefer Xtreme Labs SpeedTest as an iPhone network performance test – it does give uplink and downlink speeds. I would be intrigued to see what the uplink was on the train – I suspect it might be MUCH faster than Comcast AND ATT. Which would suggest sending those BIG emails with attachments on the train than from home.
2. Dewayne’s getting much more performance from his Comcast connection than I am getting from mine … I peak out below 4 Mbps. Measured both with SpeedTest on the iPhone as well as Chariot.
Ken,
You and Dewayne aren’t getting much bandwidth from your respective ISPs. I measured my connection in Amsterdam where I have DSL service from Planet Internet (a subsidiary of the incumbent, KPN). They advertise “up to 20 Mbps” downlink but most of the time I get only 12 Mbps. The uplink is much slower: I get on the average between 3 to 4.5 Mbps.
Is your connection (and is Dewayne’s) typical in the US? Do you live in a semi-rural area? Dewayne is in the SF Bay Area, in a city called Fremont which is by no means rural!
Dewayne is in an urban suburb of Silicon Valley and I live almost exactly in the middle of the City of San Francisco.
The cable downlink is the GOOD news – my cable UPLINK is only 350 kbps and my DSL service (I have both since both cable and DSL have day long outages and my addiction to broadband won’t allow that) is only 1.5 Mbps down and 350 kbps up.
My DSL service is quite typical and some DSL-lite services are even slower. Cable has high variability but almost all cable and DSL services are severely limited on the uplink.
I’m very much interested in WiFi here in the City of San Francisco. Does anyone here know the status of such an effort. Is the City itself still working on such a plan? (I do know that the Google/Earthlink plan fell through 2 years ago). I’d very much like to help. Thank you. Rick Hauptman RBHauptman@aol.com
ACE is running a test that is delivering 25Mbps on their trains! only one dead spot, the tunnel, but they say it will be remedied if it goes live!
Booyah!