T-Mobile: GRPS or EGDE?
While researching the original iPhone I decided to try and find out if T-Mobile supported EDGE on their network.
First a little background:
GPRS stands for General Packet Radio Service. Simply put, it is used to provide Internet connectivity to mobile phones. GPRS allows a maximum download speed of 80kbit/s, which isn’t a lot faster than a dial-up modem (max: 56kbit/s).
EDGE is an upgrade to GPRS which is sometimes refered to as EGPRS. It provides for download speeds of up to 236.8kbit/s.
The original iPhone only supported EDGE, and in the UK, O2 spent a lot of money upgrading their network to supported. Since over here we all use 3G (UMTS) for out high speed mobile internet.
According to Wikipedia, both Orange and Vodaphone have EDGE networks. T-Mobile is listed along side them as a ‘Multi-country operator’, but no list of nations is given. Though it does appear in the list of ‘Single country operators’ – multiple times.
Though I can’t recall the acutall URLs now, I read in a few forums that some people thought that T-Mobile UK did have an EDGE network. To cut through all the ambiguity I decided to ask T-Mobile directly. I recieved a succint reply from Priyanka’ of the ‘Customer Services Email Team’:
Thanks for your email, asking me whether we support EDGE/EGPRS.
I’d like to tell you that we don’t support EDGE/EGPRS, we support only UMTS, 3G and GPRS.
So there we have it: T-Mobile: No EDGE, GRPS and 3G Only.