I managed to snag a free V360 for my wife by activating a line for my Mom's. It arrived today so I teatherd it to my laptop and averaged 112kbs. After researching, it appears the V360 is class 3 EDGE which is two slots up and down so this is the expected speed.

What class EDGE is 8700? Has anyone tested it to see what you're getting real life?

The 8700c is a Class 10 EDGE Device.

So theoretically it is slots 4 down and 2 up so 192kbs/96kbs. Has anyone tested to see what you're getting?

I am sure Mark has!


I don't think any networks in north america are class 12 yet, so unlikely the unit would be.

Max speed on Class 10 is upto 236kbps and it has been tested upto 220kbps. But Cingular will only support between 70-80kbps.

What can be used to guage the speed? All the web-based download speed tests I tried won't work with the BB browser

Where did you get these numbers? I have been reading on EDGE capabilities and from what I read each EDGE slot is 48kbs as opposed to 9.6k for GPRS. Clas 10 has 5 active slots which are configurable to 3+2 or 4+1. To get 236 you would have to have all 5 slots going one direction which can't work for TCP/IP. How was the test done?

At 4+1 you would have 192kbs down and 48kbs up minus overhead. The class slot information I found here http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs/class.shtml. Can you point me to where you got your information? I'm just trying to learn.

Also, class 10 is supposed to be configurable, is this user configurable or carrier configurable? Has anyone seen settings on the 8700?

I managed to get CNET's bandwidth speed test to work. I was able to get 403.8 Kbps from my current location. I'll run some more tests in different locations to see if I can figure out how reception affects the speeds.

I looked for configuration options for EDGE. Don't appear to be any. Not sure why you'd want to change them, but anyhoo.

CNET speed test:
http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html

Becasue of the compression used by RIM you cannot get an accurate reading with tests like CNET's. However, using the HP HW6510 I could consistently get 130-140kbs on the down load side. This is using the same Cingular account with the same SIM and BB unlimited data plan.

After doing more reading, the theoretical EDGE max is 384k which is using 8 slots in the same direction (48kX8). As joginder said, the highest class device is class 10 which only utilizes 5 active slots.

@Zoinks, you would change your slots to fit your needs. If you were uploading heavily you may want to use 3+2 which would give you two upload slots or 96k up. Most people would probably use 4+1 to max the download. It's just another setting to tweak???

Okay, so I'm wondering... has it ever been confirmed A) that T-Mobile's 8700g is also Class 10, and B) that T-Mobile's EDGE network supports the full Class 10 speed?

Because here in MD, using my 8700g as a tethered modem, I average anywhere from 90-130 kbps, which is definitely NOT a speed level appropriate for Class 10. This is based on running the download test at PC Pitstop.