EDGE on Dhiraagu
I don't think it is not official yet but Dhiraagu has deployed EDGE service on quite a few of the mobile base stations around Male' and Hulhule'. EDGE (Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution) is an update to the now familiar GPRS data services everyone uses to browse internet and send/recieve emails and MMS from mobile phones.
The coolest thing about EDGE in the perspective of end-users is that it provides three times the speed of GPRS. EDGE has a theoretical limit of 473 kbit/s while the usual EDGE over TDMA implementations can clock speeds of 384 kbit/s! Dial up and standard ISDN connections indeed do pale in comparison to the data speeds of EDGE. However, few of the current popular handsets in the Maldives seem to be EDGE capable. Accordingly, anyone wanting to enjoy the faster data transfer speeds would have to upgrade their handset to one of the newer models that do support EDGE/EGPRS.
My current handset, an i-mate SP5m smartphone, is EDGE capable and I have been able to make use of the speeds provided by EDGE. Infact, I have been able to use Woize to make smooth real-time voice calls over the EDGE connection - that is something quite unimaginable with GPRS. (Woize is an application similar to Skype but has versions available for Windows Mobile Smartphones). Browsing with a laptop or PC with the EDGE handset as a bluetooth modem also gives a more enjoyable browsing experience compared to the same with GPRS which I had posted about earlier [1] [2].
Both Dhiraagu and Wataniya are purported to have EDGE support in testing at the moment.
The coolest thing about EDGE in the perspective of end-users is that it provides three times the speed of GPRS. EDGE has a theoretical limit of 473 kbit/s while the usual EDGE over TDMA implementations can clock speeds of 384 kbit/s! Dial up and standard ISDN connections indeed do pale in comparison to the data speeds of EDGE. However, few of the current popular handsets in the Maldives seem to be EDGE capable. Accordingly, anyone wanting to enjoy the faster data transfer speeds would have to upgrade their handset to one of the newer models that do support EDGE/EGPRS.
My current handset, an i-mate SP5m smartphone, is EDGE capable and I have been able to make use of the speeds provided by EDGE. Infact, I have been able to use Woize to make smooth real-time voice calls over the EDGE connection - that is something quite unimaginable with GPRS. (Woize is an application similar to Skype but has versions available for Windows Mobile Smartphones). Browsing with a laptop or PC with the EDGE handset as a bluetooth modem also gives a more enjoyable browsing experience compared to the same with GPRS which I had posted about earlier [1] [2].
Both Dhiraagu and Wataniya are purported to have EDGE support in testing at the moment.
