Kyiv is the city where the new and the ancient make wonderful chances for cultural and aesthetical exploration. Nevertheless, before you visit this mythical city, take some time to figure out at least 2 questions: accommodation and transport.

Let us discuss choosing a place to stay. Start by considering your budget and personal preference, you could either choose to stay in a Kiev hotel, or rent an apartment. Mind the class of Kiev hotels to estimate the comfort you require and the price you can afford.

Kiev has a number of five and four star hotels. There are virtually tens and tens of less chic Kiev accommodation facilities. A luxury accommodation will cost you around $400-850 per night, 4 stars will cost $150-$500, three stars will cost you about $70-300, two stars will cost from $50 to 120 and 1 star hotels charge around 25-100 per night.

There exist also several hostels in Kiev for students and young people. In a regular hostel you can have modest but fresh accommodation facilities and some beds in one and the same room.

Read the rest of this entry »

HSPA is the name used for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) networks that provide both HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access). A presentation from 3G Americas included market statistics showing 169 UMTS operators in 71 countries and 117 HSDPA operators in 59 countries. Clearly, HSDPA is seeing a global surge of deployment, and for good reason. With user rates frequently above 1 Mbps and sub-100 msec latency, most networking applications work extremely well. As explained in a presentation from Ericsson, HSDPA was specified in 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) Release 5 specifications. Release 6 includes HSUPA, and you’ll start seeing HSUPA this year from UMTS operators such as AT&T. HSUPA will bring uplink speeds in line with downlink speeds, though as with EV-DO Rev A and WiMAX, uplink spectral efficiency is typically only half of downlink spectral efficiency, so peak rates normally will be lower than the downlink rate. Nevertheless, uplink speeds will be impressive. Ericsson showed live operator data for one network with median bit rates of 1.0 Mbps. HSUPA also enables lower latencies, as low as 50 msec when measured from the mobile device to the edge of the network. HSDPA itself will get faster, with devices supporting peak rates of 7.2 Mbps, enabling real-world throughputs of 2 Mbps to 3 Mbps, assuming the operator has the bandwidth in its backhaul to support these rates.
Read the rest of this entry »