Virgin media Tops Road Test, Followed by Vodafone

An interesting roadtest of mobile broadband providers in the United Kingdom was undertaken by a dedicated broadband comparison website, Broadband Genie. Ironically, it’s a subject of debate whether the test should be called as road test or rail test, because test was conducted on a three fifty mile train trip spanning a couple of days, to London from Cambridge, then to Bournemouth from there and back again.

The USB modems, or dongles as they are known better, put to test were; three Huawei E160 devices for Orange, O2 and Vodafone, Huawei E172 for Virgin Media, Huawei E169G for 3 Mobile and Huawei E170 for T-Mobile. At different points of the trip, the website carried out above ten speed tests for each dongle. The points included Bournemouth and King,s Cross.

The essence of the test was that the mo0st part of it was undertaken in a mixture of urban and rural areas. The only dongle that completed all the tests was of Vodafone. In this aspect, Virgin Media, 3 Broadband and Orange UK came in the second place jointly, as O2 and T-Mobile failed three tests. The word failed refers to the instance when signal was not found.

In the five categories, Virgin Media came first with Vodafone second in the 2009 Road Trip Downloader category, Vodafone emerged the winner with O2, the runner up in the 2009 Road Trip Uploader category, O2 came up winning the 2009 Road Trip’s Most Stable accolade, followed by Orange, and Vodafone and Virgin Media emerged winner and runner up respectively in the 2009 Road Trip Coverage category.

Finally, in a special category called 2009 Best Dongle Software, Vodafone and Virgin Media were declared the joint winners. However, if something that posed some sort of obscurity, it was the best Dongle Software award, as it was not clear how it was judged, although the tests overall did stand to offer a refreshing insight into the defacto mobile broadband performance.