The verdict is in: Morotola has tested HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) in real-world conditions. And the results? Not as great as everyone expected:
When the user requests data, such as clicking a hyperlink for a web page, there can be delays of seconds as the radio network transitions back from a slow to a fast state. Users will not expect such delays for services marketed as “Mobile Broadband”.
[…]
The trials have shown that video streaming performance degrades when a relatively modest number of users are active. As little as four active users are sufficient to cause video streaming to freeze if scheduling priorities are not set properly.
Nice. It’s particularly interesting to note that GSM operators were boasting that HSDPA would easily surpass the maximum speeds of its nearest current rival, EVDO, by a factor of three. While that may be true on a virtually-empty network, it would seem that Verizon’s EVDO-based VCAST service, which already streams video clips at high speed to hundreds of thousands of users (and growing) without issue, seems to be holding up quite well to the competition. Likewise, Sprint launched power vision recently, which is similarly running quite well on a crowded network.
Yeah, I think I’ll stick with EVDO for now.