Pew: 77% of Wireless Subscribers Complain About Slow Speeds > How slow?

How slow?

Slowest I have seen on my 3G here in STL is about 12kbps. which my dial up connections I don't think really broke 6kbps on it's best day, 8kbps max. Most times I kept well above 12kbps and around 51 to 150kbps easy in the country.

I may not have the conversions right, but for dial up to 3G, 3G is definitely faster, in my experience with both.

When quoting speeds, capitalization is important:

»Satellite Forum FAQ »What does KBps and Kbps mean and how do they reflect transfer speeds?

Are you referring to bytes per second or bits per second? I ran a 300baud BBS in the 80s so I've been around a while. When faster-than-2400 baud modems arrived, I don't recall having significant problems connecting at speeds greater than 6kbps. (That's really slow!) If the other end supported it, 9600baud modems usually managed 9600 baud. 14.4 modems usually connected at their rated speed. Most questionable phone lines didn't reveal themselves until 28.8 modems arrived. Once the 56K modems arrived, maximum speeds required digital telco interconnects and V90 dialup provider capabilities.

reply to David
Sprint 3G

reply to antdude
yea I don't get those speeds around here on sprint. I get about 38kbps down and about 38kbps up. I don't even break 1mbps with sprint. I moved to clear for the office, and that is giving me easily 5.87 down and 2.01 up easy.

reply to David
I used to get 50-60 kbps per second downloads. Using v.42bis compression, I would often hit 200-220kbps while downloading usenet headers, 150-200kbps downloading mostly text based web pages (,jpeg usually didn't compress).

Naturally you had to have configured the serial port running @ 230kbps+rts/cts flow control. So don't under rate those old dial up modem connections.