Vodafone's HSDPA wasn't overshadowed by the EV-DO contender however. In fact, it put in very similar performance figures to Rev A, although the download speed was somewhat lower.

HSDPA's weak point is its latency, generally twice as high as Rev A at 130ms or more.

The theoretical maximum performance for Rev A is 3.1Mbit/s down, and 1.8Mbit/s up. For HSDPA, it's 3.6Mbit/s currently, with 384kbit/s uploads. As evidenced by our testing, neither service comes close to its theoretical maximum performance, something that, to give them their due, both operators admit in their average speed promises which are around third of the top speed.

Interestingly, the new Sierra card performed much better in Telecom's EV-DO Rev O coverage than the older 580 model: upload speeds stayed the same at 130kbit/s or so, but downloads in areas with low signal strength almost doubled. You may wish to upgrade to the newer card if you're a Telecom customer.

The verdict: both 3G services offer high performance ' remember, we're talking cellular broadband here ' with Telecom currently having a slight edge. It's not much though and the situation should change next year when Vodafone upgrades its network to 7.2Mbit/s, and adds HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) for faster uploads.