Packet One Networks (or P1) launched its 2.3GHz Mobile WiMAX service with a big bang at the KL Convention Centre on 19 August last year.

At launch, it already covered the Kuala Lumpur City Centre and surrounding areas, Gombak, Sentul, Setapak and parts of Subang Jaya in the Klang Valley, and began extending its coverage in the Klang Valley and other major populated areas on the West Coast of Peninsular Malaysia.

Soon after launch P1 kindly loaned us a 2.4 Mbps and a 1.2 Mbps modem to conduct field tests, which we did at 11 locations in the Klang Valley between mid September and 30 December, 2008.

Since the black desktop modem has no battery, we powered it from an invertor plugged into the cigarette lighter socket of our car, which also saved us having to stop to recharge our notebook PCs’ batteries.

The tests of the 2.4 Mbps modem reported here were conducted at six different locations in one day, while those with the 1.2 Mbps modem were conducted at five different locations on different days. The detailed results are tabulated in the two tables below.

In those early days, we noticed that P1’s base stations were mostly located in commercial areas where there are shop lots, which was to be expected, since the regulator wouldn’t let P1 mount its base stations on top of residential houses and the neighbours would certainly object.

Also, the coverage of each of their base stations is small and one of their promoters informed us that each base station has a radius of about 1.5 km, while a telecommunication consultant informed us that due to the inherent technological nature of Mobile WiMAX -- namely its use of 64 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) to achieve its high speeds – the advertised speeds are only achievable when close to the base station, which ties in with our own experience of it.

For example, we achieved or even exceeded the full speed of each of the modems in all our tests, provided we were within the coverage area but we lost coverage very abruptly once we move out of the coverage area.

For example, download and upload speeds were consistent anywhere within the Taipan Triangle in USJ Subang Jaya but we lost the signal the moment we turned onto the main road just outside. Likewise, we achieved or even exceeded 2.4Mbps almost anywhere within coverage.

However, despite that, P1 has since extended and continues to extend its coverage incrementally to cover larger continuous areas, as can be seen from the latest coverage map on its website at www.p1.com.my.

Another great feature which P1 offers are high upload speeds which are than what most of its competing cellular wireless or fixed broadband service providers currently provide.

Upload speeds are very important, especially with an increasing number of users uploading bulky multi megabyte files, such as photographs and videos to social networking sites such as Flickr, mySpace, You Tube, Facebook and Nokia Ovi.

P1’s entry level, Lite package offers 400Kbps download and 150Kbps upload speeds, while both its Plus and Pro packages offer 1.2Mbps and 2.4Mbps download speeds respectively, while both offer 500Kbps upload speed.

This certainly also is a boon for professional and media photographers and videographers who need high upload speeds to submit their photos and videos from the field.

For example, we regularly upload bulky photos for our magazines to our FTP server and found P1’s high upload speeds very welcome.

P1’s black WiMAX modem connects to the PC via a LAN cable and as such needs no additional drivers and is compatible with almost any PC or Mac running any operating system, provided it has a LAN port.

The modem can also be connected to a third party WiFi access point/router so you can share its connection with family, customers or colleagues, and unlike a competing wireless broadband service provider, P1 does not object but rather educates its users on how to do this.

All our tests of the 2.4Mbps modem were conducted with a notebook PC running Windows XP, the FireFTP client for the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Dumeter speed measurement software.

The tests of the 1.2Mbps modem at four locations were conducted with a notebook PC running Sabayon Linux, the Filezilla FTP client and System Monitor included with the Linux distribution, while a test performed earlier in an office in USJ 21 was conducted with the same notebook PC running Windows Vista, the FileZilla FTP client and Dumeter.

FTP downloads and uploads were mostly done with files on our own FTP server, while the rest were video streams from various sites, including from Mobile World TV, You Tube and others.

A key difference between the readings of Dumeter and System Monitor is that Dumeter’s readings are in kilobits per second (Kbps) and megabits per second (Mbps) while System Monitor’s readings are in kilobinary bytes per second (KiBps).

The KiB is part of system of international standard symbols and names used in data processing and data transmission approved by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1999.

The IEC’s purpose is to solve a common source of confusion between the term "kilo" used to mean 1,000 but which was applied for lack of alternatives to binary number systems, where "kilo" is wrongly used to denote 1.024 and not 1,000 but the IEC's unit, "kibi" resolvs this.

Since the "computer kilo" and kibi practically mean the same thing, we simply multiplied the KiB/s readings by 8 to get kilobits/s.

The speeds given below are the highest sustained average readings for the location, though the variations in recorded speed was minimal.

As these test were conducted late last year, current speeds in thes areas could have changed due to there being more users today.

For the latest information on pricing and packages visit P1’s website above or call 1 300 800888