Originally Posted by jonmorris:
“Streaming would be painful on 2G, but you've described perfectly how 2G can work for many other things that aren't dependent on speed, but steady connectivity.
If a site has a slow backhaul, it will be as good as useless. If no data flows, you may get timeouts and errors - then your email won't be sent at all, sitting with an error in the outbox until you get back to 3G or 4G, or maybe when you get home and reconnect to Wi-Fi.
Such experiences are bad because by then you might actually have a problem if the email was important.
It's like when Orange suffered such congestion at one time, text messages would come through days later (a text being retried for transmission at ever increasing intervals, so eventually it may be many, many hours before it even attempts to re-send).
Thankfully I think with the drop in SMS usage and other network improvements, it's near impossible to have a text message fail to get delivered promptly.
But as I said, for most people (i.e. those who don't have a 2G only phone) once you get an upgraded site that delivers usable 2G, you'd be connected to it on 3G or 4G.”
I know that the Tunein app requires a steady connection rate - for example, it doesn't really matter if you have 1Mbps or 100Mbps, Tunein Radio will still work nicely. However, when you start going below 0.5Mbps, things start getting iffy, since the highest stream rate is 320kbps and the lowest 48kbps. So much below 0.5Mbps, and you start running the risk of not being able to load the stream at the required rate - particularly if you're on the edge of a cell and the connection is sometimes a bit iffy, or if you're on an older mast with little to mo throughput.
Also, since 2G can deliver a max theoretical speed of 220kbps (EDGE - assume 150kbps at the end user), it's running very close to potentially dropping out. On a 48kbps stream or lower, you might just about get away with it (assuming that the phone is constantly connected to EDGE, and using as much data/bandwidth as it possibly can for Tunein).
However, on higher bitrates (so 128kbps or more), it's just not going to work.
GPRS is even worse and will not work at all for any stream (as GPRS will give you about 30kbps in reality).
This is why 3G would be much better for stuff like Tunein - on modern masts, there is plenty of capacity on the downlink/uplink for Tunein and anything else that needs an internet connection. Even a bare bones UMTS service (384k theoretical) will run nicely on all Tunein streams, except for possibly the 320k streams.
As for slow backhaul - many ex-Orange sites, as well as older Vod/O2 sites, have either microwave or copper backhaul, which isn't ideal (copper being limited at 2Mbps, giving the end user about 0.2Mbps).
I've never experienced texts not coming through, though I have seen other people have that problem...