I used my 3.5G dongle on my laptop recently (granted in the City Centre so probably a lot of contention) on both O2 UK and T-Mobile UK, both seemed to have good browsing speed but only clocked around 800Kbit doing outright downloads/speed tests.

In my experience browsing you cannot always tell the difference between 1Mbit and 5Mbit as a lot of the page load time is pure latency and dreadfully slow advert servers. Pages with a lot of FLASH particularly introduce a ton of lag waiting for the plugin to fire up.

The best I have ever experienced was approx 1.5Mbit. :-( I don't think the UK networks have opened up full speed. But then I do not expect to be doing huge downloads all the time, although I wish the N900 browser showed the current download speed in the download manager as I certainly will be testing it out at least initially.

A few questions:

When T-Mobile upgrades to 7.2 mbits this Christmas, will that work on the N900's 10 mbits chip? Sorry if that's a stupid question.

Also, when T-Mobile rolls out 21 mbits next summer, will the N900 10mbit chip be able to match the same practical speed as a future device with a 21mbit speed?

To clarify, a 21mbit device on T-mobiles 21 mbit test network currently receives 6.8 mbits only, far cry from the 21 mbit theoretical speed. Will the N900 10 mbit chip be able to match this, or does it always need to have a 21 mbit chip to match? Thanks in advance.