HSDPA and the AT&T Tilt (AKA Kaiser)

January 5, 2008

Over the Christmas holiday my wife and I decided to do a bit of phone swapping.  To this point she has been using an AT&T Tilt which was known as "Kaiser" when it was under development.  In fact, if you pull the battery out of your AT&T Tilt, HTC TyTN II or other variant, you will see the KAIS100 code name in the back of the device

Figure 1:  KAIS100 code on the back of the AT&T Tilt

To make sure everyone is clear on what the Kaiser it, let me give you a rundown of the various carriers how have this device and their names for it:

HTC P4550
HTC TyTN II
Orange & HTC TyTN II
Vodafone VPA Compact V
Vodafone v1615
SFR v1615
Swisscom XPA v1615
T-Mobile MDA Vario III
AT&T Tilt
O2 Xda Steller
EMobile Emonster S11HT

Note that these are the GSM versions of the device.

What started me down this path was the fact that the AT&T Tilt does not have several key features enabled, most notably HSDPA connectivity.  If you are not familiar with HSDPA then check out this article on Wikipedia.  After several days of research it turned out that many other carriers have disable other features that the stock HTC TyTN II ROMs do not have disabled.  This is not a new practice - far from it - but nevertheless I find it frustrating.  The device can do something yet the carriers take that feature away from their customers.  In this particular case, I never did find an explanation on why AT&T did not enable HSDPA but I have a theory....  AT&T here in the United States has been promoting heavily their 3G network and have really built a marketing campaign around it, especially with the 2nd generation of the iPhone.  With HSDPA disabled, the network indicator on the device comes up at 3G, not H.  This eliminates any customer confusion ("Does H mean I have 3G?") and saves AT&T support engineers from having to explain it countless times.  Again, this is my theory...  Just so everyone is clear, 3G, by definition, included HSPA (HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+) as well as UMTS, FOMA and W-CDMA.  The variances here are the speeds which you can obtain while downloading on your device.  The different speed rates will largely depend on your carrier but HSDPA can do up to 14.4 Mbits/sec.  The only carrier I know of that does a full 14.4 Mbits/sec is Australia's Telstra (can at least go that high depending on network conditions).  Here in the United States, AT&T allows up to 3.6 Mbits/sec.  I could spend hours trying to explain HSDPA versus EDGE versus UMTS but it all boils down to speed.  I strongly recommend doing some research of your own to figure out the differences.  Yes, it is very much geek speak but is still a good to know where data network on mobile devices has been and where it is going.

The second major question or issue I ran into during my research was a tremendous amount of conflicting information on if HSDPA was indeed enabled on the Tilt or if it was disabled.  Many posts I found suggested that HSDPA was indeed enabled but only the H icon symbolizing HSDPA was disabled so that the 3G icon would be displayed (see theory above).  Other posts suggested that HSDPA was indeed disabled which would cut down the download speeds available.  Still other threads said that the icon was only disabled in the Tilt running Windows Mobile 6 but that the 6.1 upgrade actually did disable HSDPA.  Frustrating?  Yes, just a little bit.  During my research I also found that HTC TyTN II's have a Control Panel option that will allow you to enable or disable HSDPA on the device.  AT&T removed that in their ROM build so do not have the option to change it.

So the goal here is to try to set the record straight on if HSDPA is enabled or disabled on the Tilt and small tweaking tool I used and a website I used to do measured testing.  My AT&T Tilt is running Windows Mobile 6.1 (Build 19214.1.0.4 for those interested) and was upgraded as soon as the upgrade was released back in October 2008.

Figure 2:  Build information on my Tilt

I'll start by stating the results:  HSDPA was disabled on my AT&T Tilt.  The key words:  "was disabled"

To start, I snapped a device shot of my Tilt using Ilium Software's free Screen Capture application to show you that I have the 3G icon on my Tilt.

Figure 3:  The 3G icon on my Tilt

Next, I pointed Pocket Internet Explorer on my Tilt to http://www.dslreports.com/mspeed.  This sub-site of DSLReports is geared to run tests on mobile devices and I found that it works quite well.  I also realize that Pocket IE is not the fastest mobile browser available but for the sake of my tests, I wanted to provide a baseline of what I thought most Tilt users would have installed on their device.  Pocket IE comes on all Windows Mobile devices.  I ran a 1MB test and the results of the test were not bad:  669 kbit/sec.

Figure 4:  DSLReports test with 3G enabled on my Tilt

At this point I cleared the cache in Pocket IE and started up an freeware application named KaiserTweak.  KaiserTweak is a tweaking application that allows you to adjust various registry settings in your Kaiser device without having to actually go into the registry.  Think of it as Tweaks2K2 that is specific only to these devices (in fact, I use both on my Tilt now).  One of the settings in KaiserTweak allows you to enable HSDPA and specifically calls out that it is disabled on the AT&T Tilt.  I enabled HSDPA, tap exit then performed a soft reset of the device.

Figure 5:  The HSDPA enable feature in KaiserTweak

After the soft reset was completed, I now had the H icon representing my data connection type. 

Figure 6:  The H icon for my data connection now shows on my Tilt

At this point I wanted to make sure that the tweak performed by KaiserTweak wasn't just a icon change so I re-ran the DSLReports test using the same 1MB test file.  The results were an impressive 1.035 Mbit/sec!

Figure 7:  DSLReports results with HSDPA enabled on my Tilt

That is a 65% increase in speed.  In my mind, that conclusively proves that the Tilt did have HSDPA disabled and after enabling it I was achieving the true maximum speed I could with my device at this particular location (in this case, my house).  As with any data network, speeds will vary depending on your location.

Like I said, the key word before "was disabled".  Now that I have used KaiserTweak I made sure that HSDPA is enabled on my Tilt.

A couple of questions that some of you may have on this matter.  First, this does not void your warranty in any way.  This changes outlined here are software changes in the Windows Mobile registry and do not effect the hardware of your Tilt itself.  The ability to do HSDPA is already there - it just has to be turned on.  Secondly, I have found nowhere on the AT&T website where there is additional charges for the additional speed.  If you have an unlimited data plan then you should see no additional charges.  Can I guarantee that?  No, of course not so check your bill just in case.  I've not seen any changes in my billing to date.

If you have an AT&T Tilt I hope this little trick proves to be helpful and increases your download speeds as well!