T-Mobile does not publish a target speed for throttled connections. Since my phone downloaded an OTA update and bumped me past my (intentionally small) data cap, I found out. The attached screen shot is of two speed tests at the exact same location, with line of sight to a T-Mobile tower and 5 bars of LTE. The first is unrestricted, the second is throttled.

Summary: 119 kbps up, 73 down; roughly twice as fast as an old analog modem. Usable for email, simple web sites, and even catching up on G+. Very definitely throttled. Not particularly useful for web sites with lots of ads or other graphic content.

I have a week of throttled access (thanks, Google) and now I’m curious to learn which services work well with this slower access.

I’m glad to be with T-Mobile rather than paying overage for Google’s unfettered data use…

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Alan Cox August 24, 2013 05:29

Adblock+

Michael K Johnson August 24, 2013 21:42

Note for anyone else who cares: while Chrome on the desktop supports extensions and has Adblock+, Chrome on Android does not, so if you want Adblock+ on Android, Firefox for Android is the only choice, as far as I know. When I used Firefox on Android before, it really wasn’t usable yet, and I kind of hadn’t gotten back around to trying it again. Silly me. I fixed that today.

So far, I prefer the “tab” behavior in Firefox. I prefer the Firefox list view to the Chrome accordion view. I find that side-to-side swipes in Chrome take me to a different tab a lot when I don’t want to switch tabs, so I prefer Firefox for that too.

I’m curious to see how well it compares for stability. So far, I’ve had one Firefox crash.

Alan Cox August 25, 2013 06:48

There is also a firewall based android adblock

Michael K Johnson August 25, 2013 09:02

Firewall based if you are rooted; proxy based and thus more limited otherwise. They recommend using the extension in Firefox. And the app works only for WiFi unless you are rooted. https://adblockplus.org/en/android-about

(Now, just wait for Google to kill this post for linking to adblock…)

Rune Morling August 27, 2013 09:00

F-droid has something called ‘AdAway’ which works by adding entries to the local hosts file. Root is required, I think. Works like a charm IME.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable