Orange Freedom Pro

The title says nothing. It is funny watching all those marketing departments from a distance... Every now and then they come up with - what they think - clever names, that mean nothing... Anyway... Freedom Pro is the name of the new mobile data service by Orange in Poland, operating in the NMT 450 MHz band, the band they initially acquired for the pre - GSM, analog NMT, the first mobile voice network in Poland.

Regardless of the name of the new service, what they have done is quite interesting. They took CDMA EV-DO, probably the most spectrum efficient mobile data technology, and implemented it in the 450MHz band. 450 MHz has some unique characteristics. The most important is the range - the cells are large and as they already had the entire country covered by the NMT towers, it was just a matter or replacing the NMT nodes with CDMA ones. The result? Mobile Internet with rural coverage at broadband - like speeds.

At the moment Orange.PL has just one device working on the CDMA network - the pictured Axesstel MV410 CDMA/WiFi router. I tested the service for a couple of days. The signal is not always strong - actually at my home in the country it barely connects, but this does not prevent it to deliver good data pipe: 1.0 - 1.5 Mbps downlink, 0.3 - 0.6 Mbps uplink and latency of around 100ms. Suffice to say my UMA-capable Blackberry happily connected via the WiFi/CDMA pipe as it usually does over my DSL line. Setting numbers aside, the connection feels fast. I suspect it either does not go into an idle mode (as UMTS devices do) or the wake from idle time with synchronous CDMA is much shorter. Anyway it does feel the same as regular 1Mbps ADSL line. Definitely more responsive than UMTS/HSDPA modems I often use. Adding to that the extremely easy setup - turn on the router (it does all the mobile network tasks automatically) and let your computer find the WiFi network - suddenly we have a very good product for the rural unwired Internet users.

The downside is probably not very high cell capacity, which is fine outside cities, but on the other hand do not expect a stellar service in highly populated areas. The remedy to that may be coming - actually Orange.PL has a nice gadget in the pipeline - the Anydata ADU 635 CDMA/HSDPA/EDGE USB modem. This is the ultimate mobile device, that should be able to deliver the highest possible mobile Internet, wherever you go. I am promised a test device next week, so stay tuned for my report :)