There are other factors that are likely to also figure here - time of day (which impacts on the network loading)

I'd also guess that there are still a lot of CDMA users taking capacity at the core)

Then theres issues such as network bottlenecks too - IN metro Auckland Telecom and Vodafone use a lot of fibre for connecting their cellsites back to their network cores. Get ouside Auckland (yes life does exist beyond the bombay hills)and then speed results will vary again.

Lastly there's also spectrum support - if your vodafone device doesnt support 900Mhz UMTS you're stuck with 2G in the regions. XT uses 850 across the board and wont have this issue

Telecom will have new data plans, but nothing has been revealed yet.

The question is whether pricing will be tweaked around the edges, or radically revised in acknowledgment that mobile bandwidth is heading for parity with landlines.

Talking to NBR about XT's roaming plans, Telecom head of retail Alan Gourdie chose to emphasis that there would be be more transparency.

All of the cars I get into lately with bank expanders have trouble picking up certain frequencies.. is this because of XT?

Who cares what their launch lineup of phones is going to be?

Give it 6-12 months for them to work out their plan pricing, their phone lineup and the kinds of products they want to be selling (XT-based broadband for the home, for example).

Also speeds on NextG didn't slow down very much after launch and the network saturation which was also hypothesized, never actually happened.

why stop at band expanders? surely coffee makers, cays dogs and even global warming is all XTs fault - come on folks lets get real here, I mean straws, clutching, vodafone and injunctions??? Need I say more????

Embarrassing spell stuff Chris made for us guys.

"lightening effects" - rise up, rise up
"display was greated" - is that like greeted or created?
"if not perhaps that implied" this is horrific! I quitting now time

A Vodafone employee completed some speed tests in Pukekohe in March 2009, on a cellsite that appeared to have been *temporarily unlocked - in terms of having the ability to achieve upto 7.2Mbit speeds* & the below link shows the kind of speeds he obtained, which are very impressive & better than Telecom's XT Network:

http://forum.vodafone.co.nz/index.php?showtopic=1859&st=0

One of the speed tests above reached 6.64Mbit down & 0.33Mbit up - which is awesome speed for a mobile network.

I'm certain that the XT Network speeds posted on Computerworld & Geekzone & the speeds that the Vodafone employee obtained on the Vodafone Network - would both have been done when very few people were accessing the respective cell sites.

Either way, I believe both Telecom & Vodafone will will be providing much faster speeds, with better value Data Plans, very, very soon, which can only be viewed as a win for the consumer. :-)

I rushed out and donated my firstborn and left kidney to pay Vodafones obscene prices for the iPhone and have felt ripped off ever since

I spend 80% of my day on 2G (try using safari on GPRS and you learn patience) and in the rare moments when I get 3G it is only marginally faster than 2G

I've found this in all major NZ cities whilst travelling outsuide of the big cities and towns things get even worse...

If XT can speed things up then I am so there!

Well as XT has been built to 14.4mbs you will be able to use such speeds, if your hadnset permits. DONT FORGET !!!! XT is also launching W2100 UMTS as a DATA ONLY solution in all the main centres.

So not only will you get 97% coverage nationwide, but you will get dedicated data only coverage at lcoations of greater population. Not just Auckland, Wllington, Christchurch, but also Dunedin, Hamilton, Queenstown, Napier etc.....

The current 3G iPhone has a MAX speed of 3.6Mbit - in most places you will lucky to get half of this speed.

Don't forget that a new 3G iPhone is coming out very soon - which is bound to support 900Mhz UMTS - thereby working far better speed wise on the Vodafone Network.

@ annonymous - "The absolute max I got for Vodafone was 133Kbps!"

That sounds strange - you should be getting much better speeds in the city / towns than that. Where do you live roughly - do you have the latest firmware installed?

Seriously Chris, could you be any bigger fan boy of Vfone? I've been reading your articles of late, and there is an obvious bias. Now I know it's an opinion piece (is it?) but seriously, where is the excellent reporting NBR is widely known and respected for?

@ Annon - "Unfortunately that wont be the case and you'll find that the need to support 2G (for the bulk of our customers) over 900Mhz will limit the extent of extended 3G over 900Mhz at least in cities where there isnt as much spectrum capacity"

I'm not sure what you mean by the above post??

900Mhz UMTS - Extended 3G (used in rural areas) - will be available at all current Vodafone 2G sites by May 31 this year - providing "3G coverage to 97% of the places New Zealanders live work and play".

2100Mhz UMTS is utilised in cities & towns for extra capacity.

As I said in my article, XT has not been launched yet, but I hope Telecom sees the need to totally revisit mobile data pricing, not just tweak it. Vodafone also needs to totall reset its mobile data pricing, as I've written before.

No one's doing Telecom - or Vodafone or Two Degrees/NZ Comms - any favours if they write a rah-rah article that sets customer expectations too high.

I have had a Vodafone 3G iPhone for 9 months. I have never experienced 3Mbps. In fact, I struggle to maintain a 3G connection even in the city. Best I have ever got using Speedtest.net is 300kbps. (90% slower than the speed mentioned in your article). You should check with real life users - don't believe the Vodafone marketing.

Wow, the fanboys, particularly Telecom one are really out in force. Personally I wish Telecom good luck. Past history has shown though things are not going to get much better for the consumer. Both networks are more interested in making high profits by keeping charges high rather then by increasing usage by keeping charges low. I'm sure Telecom will have some nice new data plans but anyone who expects them to be super cheap is seriously mistaken.

Personally, my hopes are more set on NZ Comms. Neither Vodafone nor XT/Telecom have shown any real propensity to actually bring prices down particularly at the low end/casual user rate of the market. For example Vodafone's 1 dollar for 10mb isn't too bad but still way too high for someone who just wants to check out a website to verify something etc. If they had made it 10 cents for 1mb perhaps. Similarly 1000 texts for $10 isn't too bad, but what about if you don't actually want to send anywhere near that many? Why not bring texts down to a more reasonable price. And then there's the price of international texts... (Of course perhaps this is one reason why neither network wants to provide a decent low usage option. Suddenly people may start to look at using a web or application service that provides texts at 1/4 or less of the cost).

Indeed I wonder if Telecom's XT is going to have anything for the casual user initially. Despite what some people seem to believe, Telecom's network is not GSM. It is UMTS (sometimes called 3GSM) the 3G replacement for GSM. You cannot use GSM handsets on the Telecom network. You can use some UMTS handsets although the vast majority of those currently available don't support the frequency band used by Telecom (the iPhone 3G is one that does). Many of the low cost GSM handsets lack 3G anyway. This is significant because it means that Telecom won't have anywhere near as much choice as Vodafone have for handsets particularly at the low end of the market.
(And the parallel importers can't help.) A look at Telstra's NextG network will give people an idea of what to expect (do bear in mind that Telstra does have a GSM network so make sure the phone actually supports Telstra's 3G). Of course it's possible to build low cost ones, particularly if you exclude GSM (but that would have serious implications for roaming and Telecom lacks the size to have a big say here) and in 3-5 years this isn't going to be an issue but at the current time I would expect the phones available in the low end of the market to be limited for Telecom. The one advantage is you will have 3G speeds (since with Vodafone often the low end phones are not 3G).

So yeah from my POV Telecom's XT doesn't seem that interesting. My phone recently broke so I'm waiting for Telecom's real launch to see what they bring to the market but my hopes aren't high. NZ Communications still seems our best hope. The question is, will NZ Communications actually make a difference? Are they really interested in fighting the duopoly or just in joining them? And can they? Or is the price they're paying Vodafone for domestic roaming too much?

900Mhz UMTS - Extended 3G (used in rural areas) - will be available at all current Vodafone 2G sites by May 31 this year - providing "3G coverage to 97% of the places New Zealanders live work and play".

2100Mhz UMTS is utilised in cities & towns for extra capacity.

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I think what he/she's saying is that Vodafone's capacity for their 900mhz 3G is limited since their already using most of the spectrum for their GSM network so they don't have much available. This first statement is partially true although how significant the capacity issue is I don't know.

my iPhone performs like an absolute dog on Vodafones network (I work in central Auckland, live in the west) and the near endless and continuous switching from 2G to 3G at my workplace kills its battery realy quickly. When attempting to run a speed test while wondering around the CBD today I was only able to get 3G in a select few locations and the speed was so slow that I couldnt complete the speed test. At home I cant even get 3G so are stuck on GSM which just didnt work in any practical sense for checking email etc. The really annoying thing was that when I holidayed in the USA I was getting pretty speedy 3G speeds in most cities.

Does anyone else get dropped calls all the time?

From what I have seen Chris you don't know much about much.
As for over hyping the network capabilities, I agree though. Still going to be a service dependant on external factors. Another thing to noteis that when VP upgrades it's network to 3g, in order to compete with XT's coverage it's going to need to increase in power significantly, possibly bringing it's own poor upgrade choices previously further into public view as "spurious" transmissions will possibly interfere with the XT and 2degrees networks.

We do have 900Mhz spectrum available for 3G in rural/regional locations because most towns etc are serviced by either a single or a small number of base stations.

In the bigger cities however there is more congestion and the cities are also where we have the bulk of our GSM (2G) customers. So we have to carefully balance the customer experience against demand for 3G coverage against the large numbers of GSM customers. Supplying rock solid 3G coverage will impact on GSM customers and supplying solid GSM will impact on 3G coverage.