Article written for The Killarney Outlook 21st March 2008.

My first car was a 1964 Hillman Super Minx Estate. It was old when I bought it but it gave me great service in New Zealand where I lived at the time. Amongst the very few features of the car was that it was built like a tank. Often, if wanting to take a photograph from the side of the road, I would clamber on top of the car roof for a better angle. I wouldn’t dare try that trick on a modern vehicle.

Being an elderly car its acceleration and top speed left a great deal to the imagination but it was reliable, in a masochistic sort of way, and I only once had to have the engine head replaced after a particularly long run through the Southern Alps left the top of two cylinders with holes after overheating.  Top speed was 60mph going downhill with a tail wind providing, it must be said, that the hill was sufficiently long and steep enough and the tail wind was just this side of storm force 12.

About the same time I owned the Super Minx I also acquired my first modem that gave me speeds of 1200bits per second which is the computer equivalent of crawling. Modems increased in speed over the years until they reached the dizzy speeds of 56kbp/s, a whole 50 times faster that my original modem and the computer equivalent of staggering home from the pub.

Then came broadband....well, for most of us it didn’t come for many years after and we could only envy those with high speed data connections. Even today, many people outside the main urban centres still cannot get Broadband.

However, this may soon come to an end. HSDPA is being rolled out!

“What”, I hear you cry, “is HSDPA?”

Well, HSDPA is an acronym for High Speed Downlink Packet Access, a data service that runs across 3G cellular networks. Unlike the older 3G Networks that used CDMA technology (data links capped out at 2mbp/s and cost a lot) HSDPA uses W-CDMA that can support data transmissions of up to 14.4mbp/s and costs are very reasonable. Currently Vodafone, 3 and O2 are rolling out HSDPA networks nationwide. If you have a 3G mobile phone then you can check if you can see a 3G network by simply searching for available networks and seeing if the 3G symbol appears next to any of the networks on the list. (If it is O2 then come and see us, we have some great deals on O2 data products)

I have been using the HSDPA service from O2 for several months and I am impressed. During the day I regularly get speeds in excess of 2.5mbp/s down and an uplink speed of 300kbp/s. The maximum for the service currently is 3.6mbp/s down and 384kbp/s up but plans are already afoot to increase this to 7.2mbp/s. The major downside is that there is a 10GB traffic cap per month. However, this service sure beats dial up. After all, I may remember my Hillman Super Minx Estate with fondness but I wouldn’t want to still be driving it!