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Mobile comparison website Broadband Genie has revealed the latest results of its annual "road trip" state of mobile broadband analysis which compares the real life performance of six of Britain's biggest mobile phone operators.

The Broadband Genie team carried out the experiment on a 350-miles return journey from Cambridge to Bournemouth in a train and the tests consisted of downloading podcasts, streaming videos and audio.

All operators were commended by BG for what was essentially a pleasant trip without many hitches.  All however were unable to match last year's feat by Vodafone which finished all tests; indeed the six operators had at least two failures.

Amongst performances that impressed, T-Mobile managed to push a 13MB podcast in 22 seconds only, which translates into an eye popping 4.8Mbps.

Both Vodafone and 3 UK also managed to put in some decent numbers although not as spectacular as T-Mobile.  The other three - Virgin Media, O2 and Orange - didn't fare as well though with much slower download performances.

Interestingly, four of the dongles being used were manufactured by Chinese giant Huawei with the two others courtesy of ZTE and TCT.  O2 was the only provider which stuck to last year's dongle.

That said, measuring speeds on a mobile broadband service is fraught with difficulties because of so many variables that affect a particular test.  This ranges from the time of the day, the number of concurrent users, the train speed, tunnels etc.

Source:-   ITProPortal (http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/4/23/t-mobile-best-mobile-broadband-operator-move/showall/).

Their Comments:

T-Mobile is therefore the clear winner of this year's list.  Last year saw the success of Virgin Media which, surprisingly is a mobile virtual network operator, which means that it depends on other networks.

Why don't they try a different route?  ::) Carlisle - Bournemouth or Inverness - Bournemouth. I'm sure the results wouldn't look so good for T-Mobile.

dlR