MrZorbatron

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

This is and is not true.  Latency is a big part when the page is comprised of lots of simple elements.  Some of these modern pages, however, have +1MB data to load per page.  Once the size per item begins to overshadow the number of items, the relevant statistic becomes bandwidth and not latency.  200ms to establish connections, which conclude 200ms later after carrying 150K each, would be rather fast.  Think of if you had 80ms latency but to load each 150K item took 400ms.  Overall, you are still feeling slower, despite the lower latency connection.

 - Samsung SPH-A500.  Pretty but awful radio.  Traded (plus $100) for Sanyo 5300 after about 5 months.

 - Sanyo SCP-5300 (AKA Sprint VM4500, during the short lived Sprint renumber by market position kick).  Outstanding reception.  Also the first camera phone model with a built-in flash.  Actually took better pictures than most phones until about two years later.

 - Sanyo SCP-5500.  All around great phone.  Took video too.  It sits forever charged and waiting for me in case it's ever needed again.  Definitely one of my favorites.

 - Samsung SPH-A900.  What the RAZR should have been, though kind of a dud software wise.  You had to love random resets.

 - Samsung SPH-A900m.  After the probably eighth A900 Sprint replaced for me, they gave me this one.  It has vastly improved performance in all respects.  I actually did some interesting modifications, like grinding away part of a metal edge that obstructed the antenna at certain angles, changed the keypad LEDs to a bright white, as well as a few other things to enhance this handset.

 - Sanyo M1.  This was an interesting phone.  It actually had an auto-focus camera, and the ability to manually lock the focus on something before taking the photo.  Camera showed for every bit of its two megapixel resolution, so well that I would say it is the best 2MP phone camera ever.  1GB of storage was great for taking snapshots.  Recorded pretty good video too.  Very good reception.  Awful standby life for a non smartphone, about 3 days.  Great talk time for a flip phone of its time.

 - Hitachi SH-G1000.  In a word, Garbage.  Decent PDA, bad phone.

 - Palm Pre.  Love it.  Still love it.  I have a totally pristine Pre, lightly modified, clocked 1000MHz on my shelf, with some hand-build CPU cooling modification including a piece of pure silver for heat dissipation.  Camera was decent on a bright and sunny day, but overall the old M1's was better.

 - Samsung SPH-M900.  Helped me fall in love with OLED displays.  Camera finally consistently better than the old Sanyo M1.  Had a keyboard with a rather funky layout.  Now runs Android 2.3, very near bone stock Google style.

 - Samsung SPH-D700.  Another OLED, this one you could see in the sun.  Camera actually finally pretty usable for its time as cameras (not just phone cameras) went.  Bad radio.  Many disconnected calls.  Performed to a level that made most other phones for about a year seem slow.  Still pretty usable today.  WiMAX.

 - Motorola MB855.  Back to the world of LCDs for a bit, this one was a sharp LCD but used a goofy 4 way pentile arrangement to its pixels to brighten the image.  Camera very sharp but funky color rendition, noisy picture.  Epic was better.  Great video recording.  Worked well with Motorola's heavily white theme.  GREAT reception, best smartphone I have ever used radio-wise.  I would say finally this was a smartphone that could hold its own against regular phones with good radios.  WiMAX.

 - Samsung SPL-L710.  My current main phone, and probably the one the least in need of a review.  A bit too big.

Pre-Sprint:

 - Motorola DPC-550 (Verizon, formerly Airtouch, formerly CellularONE).  Mom and Dad's old phone.  They activated it for me at age 15 as long as I could pay the bill.  It cost $12.99/month with 30 minutes of airtime which was good for double that if used during off-peak hours.  Additional airtime cost 25 cents per minute on peak and 12 cents off peak (night).

 - Nextel i1000+.  Great phone.  Loudest ringer ever.  Good reception.  Unusable Internet.  I still have this around somewhere.

 - Nextel i90c.  Smaller, prettier.  Not the greatest reception.  Semi-usable internet.  Thrown in the garbage can (and not retrieved) while walking through the downstairs science wing hallway in my high school in late 2001 or early 2002, after the fifth or sixth time it disconnected a call during a 10 minute time span, all the while supposedly having full or nearly-full signal.  Went back to i1000.

 - Nextel i95cl.  Bigger, prettier display.  Now in color.  Bulkier.  More useful internet.  Bad reception.  Required fondness for calls being disconnected mid-sentence.  Microwaved.  Sent back as dead.  Replaced.  Replacement phone, although brand new, was equally bad.  Switched to Sprint, see above.

Green frog

I haven't observed the numbers on the debug screen to correlate with the tower numbers on the map myself.

not always the case. in san diego many sites are within 1 mile apart and you can be getting LTE signal from a farther tower.

You can tell approximately by signal strength though. If you're at -66dBm or so, generally you are within 500' of the tower. Also, in cases like San Diego, antennas tend to have more down-angle to deliberately limit range, thus decreasing interference resulting from overlap with neighboring cells (which could reduce capacity if not mitigated). This additional downward focus also serves to increase signal strength within the area served by the tower, improving in-building performance.

Yes. You look for the big neon sign that says "LTE is here!"

More seriously, you could manually reset the radio on your phone while near the tower and then check signal level using LTE RF engineering screen or the status screen on your phone (if it shows LTE signal level there, not all do) while under or very close to the tower in question. Resetting the phone is done by cycling it on and off of Airplane mode, or on some models, turning cellular data on and off is sufficient to trigger a re-scan. Be sure you leave it in airplane mode for at least 10 seconds or so and see the signal bars and data indicator disappear before you turn airplane mode back off.

The phone only checks for LTE signal otherwise every 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the model. The more recently it detected LTE signal, the more often it will scan for it. For example, my GS3 I have observed to go on and off of LTE a number of times in only about 10 minutes when I am in an area with a lot of buildings and hills that might block signal. On the other hand, if I have been away from LTE for a substantial amount of time few hours), it might be 10 or 15 minutes after I am back in the area before it looks for and connects to it.