Ah yes, E-mobile ... it was awesome back in early 2007 when they
launched and everyone was reporting actual in-use speeds of somewhere
around 1.5 Mbps downstream and consistent sub-100ms pings -- even in
the most crowded areas of town. At that performance level, stuff
like Skype and YouTube worked great (even when I had to use
BitTorrent in a pinch it ran at hundreds of kByte/sec) and I hardly
ever needed to look for a wired connection to get something done.
Fast forward to early 2008 and lots of Japanese blogs are complaining
about performance problems. Personally, I typically get about 50-100
kByte/sec with the USB modem (D01HW) -- and the variation in latency
is such that you will have to look for a more reliable connection if
you want to use anything real-time (voip, videoconference, etc.) for
business. In the last month or so (in Tokyo), the throughput and the
incidence of hung or dropped connections seems to have improved a bit
though.
Interestingly, that level of performance seems to be independent of
location (anywhere in Japan), crowding, or time of day. It looks
like they're just tweaking some flat throttling settings to handle
the increased subscriber load. So, that's a long-winded way of
saying, for current E-mobile subscribers, I guess it's not in our
best interests to recommend people to sign up right now. :)
With DoCoMo set to reduce the cost of their flat-rate PC data plans,
I'm curious how the data performance compares. Anybody using flat
rate data on DoCoMo care to share their experience?
---
Oh, and in terms of Linux connectivity, see DokuroSama's post here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-622924.html
On May 25, 2008, at 11:32 AM, Shannon Jacobs wrote:
> It seems that eMobile offers an unlimited wireless connection
> service around 5,000 yen/month. It's best effort with a max around
> 7 meg, though I don't know how that works in the real world. I'm
> looking at the USB device, but I'm unsure about the drivers
> (especially for Linux), and also curious if I can use it with ICS
> (or the Linux equivalent) on my home network.
Received on Mon May 26 10:01:48 2008