Network Speed

[clbowens]

Sprint's LTE network performance isn't looking good so far:  http://www.techhive.com/article/2039452/atandt-has-fastest-lte-service-t-mobile-off-to-strong-start.html

 

 

Discuss!

[Mysteriousjustin]

Alright, Everybody needs to get on opensignal and do some speedtests in a good signal area and not at the farthest point possible causing these numbers.. 

 

Edit: I just noticed that opensignal doesn't separate wimax and lte for sprint's 4g.. Seems REALLY unfair now!

[jefbal99]

This is a network still under construction, lets see what the signal strength was for those areas.  As Justin said, what is the signal strength compared to the other carriers.

[Sonic13]

Sprint's speeds are suspiciously low.

[Mobilesolutions]

Sprint's speeds are suspiciously low.

There is no suspicion.  All the math works out. 

[Rawvega]

What math? 

[Mobilesolutions]

What math? 

EVDO is limited to 3200kbps because of the chanel witdth at 1.25 mhz.  combine that with users sharing the same sector, factor in signal strength limitations and now you have poor network performance. On top of that legacy sites still have legacy backhaul,& NV 3G completed sites may have legacy backhaul until 4G is on or even after as NV 3G is often turned in clusters & surrounding sites may not ready.  

 

Unless Sonic was implying Lte is slow, but he has an iPhone 4S.

[Rawvega]

I *believe* that he was referring to the Tech Hive article from the OP which used a Galaxy Note II to specifically test LTE, not EVDO. Although with T-Mobile they included HSPA+ in their testing which, although fast, seems to defeat the purpose of attempting to determine LTE speeds.

[Mobilesolutions]

That's a no brainer.  Everyone needs to become a sponsor look at the maps, quit whining and get informed. 

[S4GRU]

It's not that bad of an article. It just will be wildly misunderstood. The article explains what they encountered in their testing. I have no reason to doubt they did experience what they experienced on the Sprint network. And they did provide Sprint an opportunity to explain why this is occurring. And Sprint did a decent job doing that.

 

The only thing further that I would have like to have known from the article is how the testing was done. Some background info would be nice. The fact they mentioned their testing was in inner city urban areas does explain why Sprint was at a disadvantage in this survey.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

[digiblur]

Alright, Everybody needs to get on opensignal and do some speedtests in a good signal area and not at the farthest point possible causing these numbers.. 

 

Edit: I just noticed that opensignal doesn't separate wimax and lte for sprint's 4g.. Seems REALLY unfair now!

 

Should I do speedtests of the site in Baton Rouge that gets 500 kbps / 100 kbps / 5000+ms pings at lunch time?  At 7am it gets 12-14 megabit down no problem...gets slow during the day for some reason especially during lunch time.

[philibuster]

Dat Kansas City ping. 34ms. Unreal.

[digiblur]

Their app is wonky....  keeps reporting 36-81 megabit on the upload sometimes.  Then on the history it is reporting the 1X signal strength and not the LTE signal for the speedtest.  The RootMetrics application does the same thing though. 

[Craig]

Do they test from locations that provide comparable signal strength and quality among the carriers? I could pick a single place to do a test with my Sprint phone vs. friends VZ and AT&T and I would kick the pants off of them. Picking a random spot and testing all three from that one location gives you a great data point - for that one location. It's not representative of the coverage and speed of a network as a whole in a given city. 

If this was addressed in the article, I apologize, I don't have time to read it completely right now.

 

I bet if they do tests once NV is complete, Sprint will equal or best VZ and AT&T in most locations. 

[money69]

I think the testing was fair, I read the entire story and looked at the data and I didn't see anything that seemed out of place. On top of that I live in Houston and have an LTE phone and the LTE speeds are good but nothing outrageous. I could care less because anything above say 3mbps on a phone is not needed in my mind at this point. 

 

Also, I run into plenty of slow spots here in Houston but Sprint is behind because of backhaul and the level of work they are doing on sites which I understand, I know they are making progress and i wouldn't have switched to them if I didn't think they were serious about the work they said they were going to do. 

[utiz4321]

This thing about who has the fastest speeds is a bit over misleading. What is the difference between 4 mbps and 32 mbps from a smart phone or tablet? Maybe if you where teathering to a laptop or multiple devices but all the carriers have limited data while teathering so what's the point? Hd video to a smartphone required 2 mbps and that is the most data intense thing I can think about that a smartphone is capable of.

[philibuster]

Well, you may argue that no one needs 32Mbps on a smartphone, but it shows (somewhat) the capacity that each tower can supply. If Sprint is this far behind even when the number of LTE users is small (purely conjecture on my part), it does not bode well for future throughput.

 

Also, on smartphone when you want information, you want it NOW. Faster means you spend less time waiting for pages to load for the information that you wanted and less power used to transmit leading to longer battery life. Faster is always better, there is no question.

[S4GRU]

Well, you may argue that no one needs 32Mbps on a smartphone, but it shows (somewhat) the capacity that each tower can supply. If Sprint is this far behind even when the number of LTE users is small (purely conjecture on my part), it does not bode well for future throughput.

 

Also, on smartphone when you want information, you want it NOW. Faster means you spend less time waiting for pages to load for the information that you wanted and less power used to transmit leading to longer battery life. Faster is always better, there is no question.

 

It does not illustrate capacity at all.

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

 

 

[philibuster]

It does not illustrate capacity at all.

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

Please elaborate?

[lilotimz]

 

 

It does not illustrate capacity at all.

 

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

 

 

Please elaborate?

I've explained this elsewhere but there is a major difference when we're talking about something loading. The biggest factor in hunan perception of fast or slow on Internet connections is the latency or ping.

 

A 5mbps connection with 60 ping will 100% of the time be faster than 30mbps with 200 ping. The greatest factor we can physically observe is the time it takes for our input for an action to go to the server and return. That is what we think of when we say fast or slow. Not the connection speed.

 

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

[philibuster]

I've explained this elsewhere but there is a major difference when we're talking about something loading. The biggest factor in hunan perception of fast or slow on Internet connections is the latency or ping.

 

A 5mbps connection with 60 ping will 100% of the time be faster than 30mbps with 200 ping. The greatest factor we can physically observe is the time it takes for our input for an action to go to the server and return. That is what we think of when we say fast or slow. Not the connection speed.

 

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

I agree that lower pings are desirable, but AT&T and Verizon's pings are similar to Sprint's. So where are we now? The three other companies' LTE is faster than Sprint's on a bandwidth level, and similar in ping. In fact, many of these test results for Sprint look like 3G speeds, save for the upload speed.

 

Back to my point, how does current average speed not correlate with future network speed (many more users on LTE wanting more bits)? After all, this is what we're talking about, right? Granted, Sprint's network is probably closer to starting than close to being finished, but I just can't see how the number of users per tower is going to go down in the future. Sprint needs a growth plan to survive, and they may be increasing their number of towers with LTE (admittedly by orders of magnitude) but so will the number of data-hungry LTE smartphones. It looks, to me, like Sprint's network is already getting full.

 

How, then, do we judge "capacity," (meaning how many users the network can support while maintaining a decent speed) if not for speed? What am I missing?

[cletus]

I agree that lower pings are desirable, but AT&T and Verizon's pings are similar to Sprint's. So where are we now? The three other companies' LTE is faster than Sprint's on a bandwidth level, and similar in ping. In fact, many of these test results for Sprint look like 3G speeds, save for the upload speed.

 

Back to my point, how does current average speed not correlate with future network speed (many more users on LTE wanting more bits)? After all, this is what we're talking about, right? Granted, Sprint's network is probably closer to starting than close to being finished, but I just can't see how the number of users per tower is going to go down in the future. Sprint needs a growth plan to survive, and they may be increasing their number of towers with LTE (admittedly by orders of magnitude) but so will the number of data-hungry LTE smartphones. It looks, to me, like Sprint's network is already getting full.

 

How, then, do we judge "capacity," (meaning how many users the network can support while maintaining a decent speed) if not for speed? What am I missing?

Capacity = potential maximum bandwidth IE 5x5 LTE theoretical speeds. Think of this as a street.

Throughput= your end to end data transmission speed. Think of this as the speed you travel through various stop signs and street lights.

 

/edit: To answer your question: Sprint has said repeatedly that they are not shooting for the super high numbers game and are looking at 3-8 Mbps speeds for each user (throughput). They can scale up backhaul to improve this speed before reaching the capacity of the network if you follow my explanation.

[WiWavelength]

Back to my point, how does current average speed not correlate with future network speed (many more users on LTE wanting more bits)? After all, this is what we're talking about, right? Granted, Sprint's network is probably closer to starting than close to being finished, but I just can't see how the number of users per tower is going to go down in the future.

 

As I stated in another thread today, using incomplete deployment to judge average speeds is premature and misguided.  Here is an example.  Because LTE deployment is still patchwork, many Sprint users are currently connecting to LTE sites one, two, even three cells distant.  That distance leads to poor signal quality and lowers speeds for those users.  Plus, those distant users loading up the live LTE sites lower speeds for the users who are actually located in the cells.  Thus, many of the speeds that users are seeing right now are not representative snapshots.

 

Honestly, some of the attitudes displayed in this thread and that other thread today disappoint me.  You are just adding fuel to the argument that Sprint should have kept LTE under wraps in each market until it was almost fully deployed.  But, for many of you, that would have meant absolutely no LTE until the middle of 2014.  So, as the saying goes, do not look a gift horse in the mouth.  Be thankful that you have any LTE at all almost right away.

 

AJ

[utiz4321]

Well, you may argue that no one needs 32Mbps on a smartphone, but it shows (somewhat) the capacity that each tower can supply. If Sprint is this far behind even when the number of LTE users is small (purely conjecture on my part), it does not bode well for future throughput.

 

Also, on smartphone when you want information, you want it NOW. Faster means you spend less time waiting for pages to load for the information that you wanted and less power used to transmit leading to longer battery life. Faster is always better, there is no question.

I am not saying no one needs 32 mbps, I am asking what the difference is in user experience between 4mbps and 32mbps is from a smartphone. My answer is none, really. From my conclusion you can infer that no one needs 32mbps on their smart phone but that is not what I said. There is no noticeable difference between the two on a smart phone (with similar pings). A person who doesn't know mbps that there phone is using will not notice a difference and so focusing so narrowly on mbps is a wast of time in my opinion. The user experience is the key, does it do what you want and well? If yes good, if no bad, really simple.

[tommym65]

I am not saying no one needs 32 mbps, I am asking what the difference is in user experience between 4mbps and 32mbps is from a smartphone. My answer is none, really. From my conclusion you can infer that no one needs 32mbps on their smart phone but that is not what I said. There is no noticeable difference between the two on a smart phone (with similar pings). A person who doesn't know mbps that there phone is using will not notice a difference and so focusing so narrowly on mbps is a wast of time in my opinion. The user experience is the key, does it do what you want and well? If yes good, if no bad, really simple.

So I was consistantly getting 36 mbps down and 13 mbps up on Sprint LTE while riding my bicycle on a bike path last weekend. As you say, 36 mb or 32 mb, or for that matter even 4 or 5 mb are wonderful speeds, right up there with cable and dsl.

 

But then the light bulb goes on: What the (bleep) am I gonna do with 36 mbps on a BICYCLE?!