LaunchPad Blog

Its no secret that the EDGE network isn’t exactly zippity do dah when it comes to speed. Because of this, I’m putting together a series of articles on how to optimize your web apps for the EDGE network. To kick off the series, we’ll start by taking a look at EDGE and trying to understand a little more about the network itself. Later in the series, I’ve got some killer techniques which will help make your apps fly on EDGE!

So whatcha got under the hood?

With EDGE, there are 12 different classes of devices. The higher the class, the more download/upload slots; therefore, faster data transfers. The iPhone is a Class 12 device which means it has 4 upload and 4 download slots with a maximum of 5 active slots at any given time. So, your best case scenario is a transfer rate of 236.8 Kbps for download and 59.2 Kbps for upload. *

Definitely faster than dial-up, but it doesn’t touch cable/dsl.

* It’s been reported that some download rates have reached close to 300 Kbps, but these burst rates are not common.

My, what huge latency you have!

Another downside is EDGE’s high latency rates. Because of the delay from your original request to the server and EDGE’s response from the server, this latency causes downloads to appear slower than the actual download time itself.

All is not lost. Stay tuned!

While these realities will stay with us for a while—at least till 3g iPhones arrive—there are indeed steps we can take to optimize our web apps with EDGE’s limitations in mind. Stay tuned for the next article in the series, where we’ll explore in-depth the wonderful possibilities of image concatenation.