Every extra second feels like it helps

This week at Gitex Gulf News has reported heavily on the rollout of new 4G services and the emergence by year's end of a higher speed broadband that will be offered initially via a super USB dongle by etisalat.

Earlier this week, Ali Al Ahmad, chief corporate communications officer at etisalat, said the company would start selling USB dongles giving users super speeds within two months.

"Yes, it's ready and we have covered over 80 per cent of the UAE," said Al Ahmad, noting that the new 4G service went live in late September.

With speeds of up to 150 mbps, Al Ahmad said "the speed is incomparable to any network."

One of the most noticeable activities on the web to change with the new dongles will be the downloading of larger files in a much shorter time.

Movies, for example, that take two or three hours can be downloaded in only minutes.

Downloading music files as well will be much faster.

I got my mitts on one of the dongles courtesy of etisalat to be one of the first to try out the new 4G service and after about 30 minutes speeding around the internet, we were impressed.

The new 4G service is lightning fast.

Web pages pop up almost instantly, and other clicks on links and the routine surfing stuff is done with ease, the way I presume the internet was meant to be surfed.

I logged on to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) website at www.tra.ae and did a trial test on the broadband speed page, a service to ensure that telecoms are providing the speed they promise.

Speed

Much to our delight, with the new 4G dongle, our first test clocked a download speed up to 78.78 megabytes per second, blistering fast compared to far lower speeds in the past. The upload speed registered at 28.88 mbps.

Not satisfied with just one test, we gave the dongle two more runs through the TRA broadband radar and the speeds stayed pretty consistent.

The second attempt registered an even faster download speed of 79.28 mbps but the upload speed dropped to 27.88 mbps.

Our third test yield a lower 66.19 mbps download speed and an upload speed of 27.97.

Hats off to etisalat; now we have to see how well the service works at homes across the UAE because only 80 per cent of the UAE is enabled to receive 4G.

Time will tell.

In short, the biggest joy for us was ripping through internet web pages at lightning speed — there were no delays and we were given access to everything instantly.

With life moving so fast these days, every extra second we can add into our daily sked may not really help but perhaps it just feels like it does.