AT&T still has parts of the country sitting in EDGE territory. I realize there are only a few areas, but it's 2012 and AT&T still hasn't completed a 3G rollout. Grant you, I don't live in a very rural area. I live in a city of 7,000 or so in northern Louisiana. Come on AT&T, all I want is 3G. Anyone else out there still stuck on E with their iPhone?
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AT&T LTE/HSPA+ is fast and all...but
- Thread starter DrakeMcEachern
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I heard AT&T will start shutting off Edge down the road so Im sure they will at least upgrade those 2G areas to 3G or HSPA+.
AT&T's LTE network is so far behind Verizon is because the spectrum needed for LTE is currently being used by their 2G network. So as they shutdown their 2G network, AT&T will recycle those spectrum for their LTE network. AT&T has already announced that they plan to shut down their 2G network by 2017.
I'm predicting that AT&T's LTE will lag behind Verizon until sometime around 2017. There's another article I read that shows what spectrum AT&T and Verizon has. They both currently have enough to have comparable network but AT&T's spectrum's are tied up at the moment.
Source: http://phandroid.com/2012/08/03/att-to-power-down-2g-network-by-2017/
That depends on location and signal. I get 25 down and 9 up on Verizon with 50-100ms pings.
That isn't really surprising since Verizon has more LTE devices on their network right now. My guess is that the AT&T speeds will be dropping around the 21st of September.
It's a big country; thats a lot of ground to cover.
That said, I can drive for 2 hours in any direction and maintain HSPA+ service, which is far better than Verizon, or Sprint LTE/WiMax. I don't have enough experience with T-Mobile to comment on their HSPA+ coverage.
Unless you're using the hotspot, you're not going to notice the difference over the Verizon speeds.
What? That is not true at all. AT&T still has quite a lot of native EDGE areas, and any of it that isn't AT&T is a roaming partner that is not T-Mobile. I can't honestly think of a single area that AT&T roams on that is T-Mobile.
Nothing unique to at&t. Every carrier has holes in their coverage and regions that aren't up to speed.
Well said.
Unless you're downloading big files like 800mb or 1GB or so then you will not be able to tell a difference between 8mbps and 40mbps for example. Facebook, website browsing, pandora streaming, email and all the usual stuff will still load and open at the same rate.
AT&T roams on T-Mobile is very rural PA, MA, ND, SD, MI, ME, basically anywhere there isn't AT&T. AT&T's data coverage map has a roaming overlay on it. A large part of the EDGE data area is labeled as a roaming partner. In fact, I'm roaming on T-Mobile right now in the wonderful county of Bedford in southern Pennsylvina.
EDGE is so slow I can't believe they're waiting till 2017 to turn it off. I'd rather not be connected to be honest as almost nothing loads on a smartphone using it. I can't believe they have that many phones that are EDGE only on the network still.
Depends on area. Playing with a coworkers Att iPad 3rd Gen and the best we can get is 80ms. My Verizon android tablet is getting 41ms. This is like 50 test we tried until I realized how much data speedtest was eating up lol....thankfully I was on my Android tablet and checked data usage and is show specifically how much data each app eats up...
Edit : btw taken in Baltimore, MD....working weekend and holidays isn't a problem for me in the center of a grand prix track...
EDGE was a breakthrough data only network protocol. It allowed broadband like speeds on a GSM cellular connection. You're thinking of GPRS. That protocol provided dial-up speeds over the airwaves and is very unusable today.
Also, VZW is less reasonably priced and notoriously bad with employee benefit programs.