During some downtime at the 10th Annual Telecommunications and ICT Summit at Auckland's Hyatt hotel yesterday, I ran a couple of cellular broadband tests.

It seemed like an appropriate venue.

First, a Sierra Wireless 885u USB stick for Telecom XT ($399; a data card version costs $199):

Again, it's a very solid result for XT, closely mirroring my launch day tests (in and around NBR's downtown Auckland office), and efforts tethering a Nokia E75 running on XT (and a Nokia E75 running on Vodafone) through my Lenovo netbook.

As I've noted before, benchmarking a cellular connection is coming of a black art, given the vagaries of traffic loading, and location to the nearest cell site for either provider, among a number of other factors.

Next up I tried a Vodafone Mobile Connect USB Stick (aka Vodem II; $299; a PC Card version is $199. Both are free on 24-month plans)

Both the Vodafone and Telecom USB sticks take a SIM card, and both let you txt your SIM card contacts, or arrange your address book, from your laptop screen. And in both cases, set-up is plug and play, and let you connect with a click.

The XT stick's Watcher software was better at autosensing when I attached the modem (in my Vista set-up). The Vodem is less fiddly for those constantly shifting the same SIM between phone and USB stick - by dint of a handy slider tray, a happy contrast to the XT stick's fish with your fingernails approach - and its sidemounted MicoSD slot means you can can slide in a memory card without removing the modem. The XT stick's MicroSD slot is just above the USB plug, and inaccessible when in use.

At the Hyatt, the Vodem tanked, with its monitoring software shimering between 3G and the full-blooded 3G/HSPA. It was a poor result, and similar to the speed I got when tethering the Vodafone iteration of Nokia's E75 around Mt Eden:

As a reference, here's how the Hyatt's conference room wi-fi rated
(which is very much a reflectio on the state of the local wireless connection than Orcon, the landline ISP at the end of the chain). You'll note it's three times slower than XT - and in fact on the second day of the conference I took to using XT exclusively (which I wouldn't in the real-world, so to speak, since the wi-fi was free, but XT and Vodafone 3G mobile data are relatively pricey):

Back at the office today, I gave the Vodem another whirl. Again, it was pretty so-so:

I know at least one reader has suggested that given SpeedTest.Net - which operates worldwide - uses a server based with occassional Telecom ally (and oft-times competitor) WorldXChange in Auckland, there may be some kind of Krazy Konspiracy at play.

For his benefit, I repeated the benchmark using Vodafone's own broadband test, and got a similar result (623Kbit/s = 0.62Mbit/s). It's marginally faster, though still a long distance behind the top speed I've every got from a Vodafone 3G card (1.9Mbit/s, last September).

So: game set and match to XT?

Hardly.

For the moment, XT enjoys a light customer load. But that, of course, will change - so I'll keep testing over the coming months to see if the extra bodies impact speed, and at the same time test the Vodem in more places.

Elsewhere
A couple of classics from the Daily Mail:

This guy has wired his cottage with sensors so it can tweet its temperature, or whether any taps are dripping.

And here are some stunning Nasa pictures, taken from the International Space Station, of a Russian volcano that literally blows a hole in the sky.

And appros pos nothing, here are some mind-blowing 3D aerial panoramas of New York.