AT&T LTE/HSPA+ is fast and all...but

[christophermdia]

Yea, and with Verizon expanding at the same rate will always leave AT&T in the dust in comparison....I travel a lot, and everywhere I go I'm getting great Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad, where even 4 or 5 bars of AT&T hspda in those same areas just fail to load web pages at all. I really think that AT&T is way too congested, not enough bandwidth to support everyone most likely due to the initial exclusivity deals with apple, but now pele have the option to spread out helping everyone.

and ATT has launched in 9 new cities as well as including a list of cities that will have LTE by the end of the year

The nine cities:

Anchorage, Alaska
Bakersfield, Calif.
Bridgeport, Conn.
Jacksonville, Fla.
Modesto, Calif.
North Montgomery County, Md.
Syracuse, N.Y.
Omaha, Neb.
Northern N.J.

The additional markets:

Albany, N.Y.
Albuquerque, N.M.
Allentown, Pa.
Birmingham, Ala.
Boise, Idaho
Charleston, S.C.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Columbia, S.C.
Columbus, Ohio
Denver-Boulder, Colo.
Detroit, Mich.
El Paso, Texas
Fayetteville, N.C.
Ft. Myers, Fla.
Gary, Ind.
Grand Rapids, Mich.
Green Bay, Wis.
Harrisburg, Pa.
Hartford, Conn.
Hawaii
Knoxville, Tenn.
Lancaster, Pa.
Little Rock, Ark.
Louisville, Ky.
Memphis, Tenn.
Milwaukee, Wis.
Nashua, N.H.
New Haven, Conn.
Philadelphia, Pa.
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Portland, Ore.
Providence, R.I.
Reading, Pa.
Rochester, N.Y.
Sacramento, Calif.
Salinas-Seaside-Monterey, Calif.
Seattle, Wash.
Springfield, Mass.
Toledo, Ohio
Tucson, Ariz.
Tulsa, Okla.
Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Wilmington, Del.

 

[DrakeMcEachern]

Yea, and with Verizon expanding at the same rate will always leave AT&T in the dust in comparison....I travel a lot, and everywhere I go I'm getting great Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad, where even 4 or 5 bars of AT&T hspda in those same areas just fail to load web pages at all. I really think that AT&T is way too congested, not enough bandwidth to support everyone most likely due to the initial exclusivity deals with apple, but now pele have the option to spread out helping everyone.

That's a fact! In one city near me, AT&T only switched to 3G from edge a month before vzw switched from 3G to LTE in the same city.

 

[SheepNutz]

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?

I also live in an Edge network not far from Cincinnati, which just got LTE. I'm in a little one county area that's 3/4 edge and 1/4 3G. It's been this way for years, even thought it's a highly populated area. Anyway, I was on a tech support chat with AT&T last night about getting my old iPhone 4 unlocked, and I asked if they could see about whether they planned on upgrading to 3G in my area soon. The guy input my address, and saw that 2 towers within a mile of my house had construction notes saying it was switching to 3G soon. He couldn't say how soon, but it sounds promising. Also, he said to use the AT&T Mark My Spot app to complain about areas with Edge, saying the data was slow. That way the network techs would see that the area needs upgrading to 3G.

 

[chiefpavvy]

Agree, AT&T is EDGE only in my small home town as well (~9000 people). However, just a few miles either direction is HSPA+ for many, many square miles.

I assume it is such a low-priority they won't bother to upgrade until they begin to completely decommission EDGE which will be some time yet.

 

[BFizzzle]

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.

He speaks the truth. VZW was just as fast as AT&T when they first rolled out lte.

 

[DrakeMcEachern]

I also live in an Edge network not far from Cincinnati, which just got LTE. I'm in a little one county area that's 3/4 edge and 1/4 3G. It's been this way for years, even thought it's a highly populated area. Anyway, I was on a tech support chat with AT&T last night about getting my old iPhone 4 unlocked, and I asked if they could see about whether they planned on upgrading to 3G in my area soon. The guy input my address, and saw that 2 towers within a mile of my house had construction notes saying it was switching to 3G soon. He couldn't say how soon, but it sounds promising. Also, he said to use the AT&T Mark My Spot app to complain about areas with Edge, saying the data was slow. That way the network techs would see that the area needs upgrading to 3G.

My family that has AT&T has called AT&T numerous times about the upgrade of our town's tower. Their phones' batteries drain at a horrendous rate because they are 20 miles south of an HSPA+ tower and 6 miles north of an Edge tower. They bounce between the two constantly but when connected to the H+ tower, their data is extremely slow, slower than edge sometimes.

 

[ViperDesign]

i think it is well known att cares more about investors than their network. Their LTE roll out is laughable at best.

 

[SheepNutz]

My family that has AT&T has called AT&T numerous times about the upgrade of our town's tower. Their phones' batteries drain at a horrendous rate because they are 20 miles south of an HSPA+ tower and 6 miles north of an Edge tower. They bounce between the two constantly but when connected to the H+ tower, their data is extremely slow, slower than edge sometimes.

When I first start my phone up, I'll have 1 bar of HSPA+ for a minute or so, but no data will transmit. Then it'll switch to edge and stay that way until the next restart.

 

[nizmoz]

Yea, and with Verizon expanding at the same rate will always leave AT&T in the dust in comparison....I travel a lot, and everywhere I go I'm getting great Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad, where even 4 or 5 bars of AT&T hspda in those same areas just fail to load web pages at all. I really think that AT&T is way too congested, not enough bandwidth to support everyone most likely due to the initial exclusivity deals with apple, but now pele have the option to spread out helping everyone.

So do I, and I had Verizon and left them because LTE and poor service. LTE is NOT that fast on Verizon. Sometimes the speeds were as slow on LTE as they are fast on AT&T 3G/4G. AT&T also has way more bandwidth available at their towers than Verizon has. So they will continue to see fast speeds.

 

[DrakeMcEachern]

So do I, and I had Verizon and left them because LTE and poor service. LTE is NOT that fast on Verizon. Sometimes the speeds were as slow on LTE as they are fast on AT&T 3G/4G. AT&T also has way more bandwidth available at their towers than Verizon has. So they will continue to see fast speeds.

Your results aren't consistent with other user's.
Where are you located?

 

[nizmoz]

Your results aren't consistent with other user's.
Where are you located?

Actually they are. http://www.howardforums.com agree's with this as many have been experiencing serious slow downs on Verizon LTE.

Texas

 

[LushMojo]

I'm up in Springhill. Webster Parish, aside from the I-20 corridor, sits in E territory still.

Move, my friend. Grew up in Louisiana. Left as soon as I was old enough. Have lived in Boulder, Colorado for 15 years and now back in New Orleans attending medical school. Will be moving to Washington state, New York or possibly somewhere in New England once residency is done.

Point is, don't wait for technology to come to you. Get out and enjoy this great country of ours. Plenty of wonderful areas to live I that have LTE. Sorry for the digression; just never understand why people stay in this state (other than maybe New Orleans).

 

[GfPQqmcRKUvP]

I'm pretty sure it's very well known at this point how AT&T's speed test superiority translates nothing to real life data loading speeds and reliability.

You'll find two 3G devices (iPhone 4S) and the Verizon will always respond quicker and download faster.

You'll find two 4G devices (iPad LTE) and the Verizon, again, wins out in a head to head loading speeds.

Not sure why the speed tests are discrepant.

Because you're wrong.

 

[Kadman]

I also live in an Edge network not far from Cincinnati, which just got LTE. I'm in a little one county area that's 3/4 edge and 1/4 3G. It's been this way for years, even thought it's a highly populated area. Anyway, I was on a tech support chat with AT&T last night about getting my old iPhone 4 unlocked, and I asked if they could see about whether they planned on upgrading to 3G in my area soon. The guy input my address, and saw that 2 towers within a mile of my house had construction notes saying it was switching to 3G soon. He couldn't say how soon, but it sounds promising. Also, he said to use the AT&T Mark My Spot app to complain about areas with Edge, saying the data was slow. That way the network techs would see that the area needs upgrading to 3G.

Please tell me your in Falmouth! We head down that way (either as a destination or passing through) enough that I feel the pain of their Edge situation (AT&T). I was down there yesterday and today and just to pull up a Google search, text based scores for games today was painful!

So again, PLEASE tell me it's Falmouth getting the upgrade!!

 

[aristobrat]

Your results aren't consistent with other user's.
Where are you located?

Here's another data point for you.

I'm located in Virginia Beach, which is VA's largest city. I live in a densely populated area (i.e. not out in the rural areas of the city), and this is what I get for Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad.

If I go two miles up the street, my Verizon iPad gets 5 bars of service, and almost 30 mbps.

It's like they rolled into here, put LTE up on enough towers to say "hey, we have LTE here", and then rolled out to another market.

In the same location that my Verizon LTE iPad gets 1 bar of service, my Verizon iPhone 4s gets 5 bars of voice/3G service. Amazing difference between the quality of their LTE network here today, and the quality of their voice/3G networks here.

The worst is when my iPad loses Verizon LTE all together, and drops to their 3G network. You rarely see speeds over 512mbps here on that. I assume that when AT&T puts LTE in here, it's going to be spotty at first, like Verizon's. The difference is that when I drop off of it (or turn it off), I'll be on their 4G network. My friends iPhone 4s get ~7mbps down with that. That's 14x faster than what I'm getting on Verizon. :/

 

[DrakeMcEachern]

Move, my friend. Grew up in Louisiana. Left as soon as I was old enough. Have lived in Boulder, Colorado for 15 years and now back in New Orleans attending medical school. Will be moving to Washington state, New York or possibly somewhere in New England once residency is done.

Point is, don't wait for technology to come to you. Get out and enjoy this great country of ours. Plenty of wonderful areas to live I that have LTE. Sorry for the digression; just never understand why people stay in this state (other than maybe New Orleans).

Uh, okay. How is this relevant?

----------

Here's another data point for you.

I'm located in Virginia Beach, which is VA's largest city. I live in a densely populated area (i.e. not out in the rural areas of the city), and this is what I get for Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad.

Image

If I go two miles up the street, my Verizon iPad gets 5 bars of service, and almost 30 mbps.

It's like they rolled into here, put LTE up on enough towers to say "hey, we have LTE here", and then rolled out to another market.

In the same location that my Verizon LTE iPad gets 1 bar of service, my Verizon iPhone 4s gets 5 bars of voice/3G service. Amazing difference between the quality of their LTE network here today, and the quality of their voice/3G networks here.

The worst is when my iPad loses Verizon LTE all together, and drops to their 3G network. You rarely see speeds over 512mbps here on that. I assume that when AT&T puts LTE in here, it's going to be spotty at first, like Verizon's. The difference is that when I drop off of it (or turn it off), I'll be on their 4G network. My friends iPhone 4s get ~7mbps down with that. That's 14x faster than what I'm getting on Verizon. :/

Ahh, I see. I have a 4G modem through Verizon and get good speeds over 4G. I guess it's area dependent.

 

[LushMojo]

Uh, okay. How is this relevant?

As I said, sorry for the digression. Enjoy Springhill. I hope your signal gets better there.

 

[rritterson]

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.

EDGE on the original iPhone was surprisingly usable. I recall speeds ~200kbps down. Then the iPhone 3G came out, and I turned off 3G at first to save battery life. For whatever reason, the EDGE download rate was about 14.4k. It's been that way with every iPhone since. I also have a t-mobile SIM for my iP4 and on t-mobile's edge network the download rate is sub-broadband too.

For everyone else commenting about LTE speeds- the processing power of the phone will be the major bottleneck, not the download rate, on any kind of decent network. Ever noticed web pages open faster on your laptop when tethering than they do directly on the phone? The CPU on the phone is the reason for that difference. I have a feeling that non-rendered downloads on the phone (e.g. downloading a song from iTunes in the background) feel so slow because the write-rate of the flash chips is also pretty bad.

 

[darster]

Here's another data point for you.

I'm located in Virginia Beach, which is VA's largest city. I live in a densely populated area (i.e. not out in the rural areas of the city), and this is what I get for Verizon LTE coverage on my iPad.

Image

If I go two miles up the street, my Verizon iPad gets 5 bars of service, and almost 30 mbps.

It's like they rolled into here, put LTE up on enough towers to say "hey, we have LTE here", and then rolled out to another market.

In the same location that my Verizon LTE iPad gets 1 bar of service, my Verizon iPhone 4s gets 5 bars of voice/3G service. Amazing difference between the quality of their LTE network here today, and the quality of their voice/3G networks here.

The worst is when my iPad loses Verizon LTE all together, and drops to their 3G network. You rarely see speeds over 512mbps here on that. I assume that when AT&T puts LTE in here, it's going to be spotty at first, like Verizon's. The difference is that when I drop off of it (or turn it off), I'll be on their 4G network. My friends iPhone 4s get ~7mbps down with that. That's 14x faster than what I'm getting on Verizon. :/

I see you also only have 1 bar on your device. You are barely pulling in LTE. Even with barely 1 bar at home I still get DL speeds 6-10 Mbs. At work, close to 30. The upload speeds with 1 bar seem on par with what I get at home too.

 

[SheepNutz]

Please tell me your in Falmouth! We head down that way (either as a destination or passing through) enough that I feel the pain of their Edge situation (AT&T). I was down there yesterday and today and just to pull up a Google search, text based scores for games today was painful!

So again, PLEASE tell me it's Falmouth getting the upgrade!!

Nope, Dry Ridge, in Grant County just west of Pendleton County. I didn't know Pendleton County was in Edge too. Actually, looking at the AT&T coverage map, it shows most of Pendleton County covered in 3G. You can always try chatting with an AT&T rep and seeing if the area you were in is due for an upgrade soon.

 

[Kadman]

Nope, Dry Ridge, in Grant County just west of Pendleton County. I didn't know Pendleton County was in Edge too. Actually, looking at the AT&T coverage map, it shows most of Pendleton County covered in 3G. You can always try chatting with an AT&T rep and seeing if the area you were in is due for an upgrade soon.

Thanks for the response. Yeah, Pendleton County in general is bad. I remember when it was pretty much no cell phone coverage at all down there, so at least we can call for help if we need to when we're down that way.

Yeah the maps are pretty bad. In fact, the AT&T coverage maps show the entire I75 route that you're on (generally speaking) as being covered, yet our frequent trips to Lexington have proven that approx 1/3 of that stretch between the 71/75 split and Lexington is Edge only. As a "soccer dad" I run into this all the time and when we start hearing the "Edge buzz" coming through the speakers, we switch to Airplane mode we switch from streaming Slacker to using the music we have on my phone. Oh well, I hope the increase in coverage in your area helps reduce the black hole between here and Lexington.

 

[SheepNutz]

Thanks for the response. Yeah, Pendleton County in general is bad. I remember when it was pretty much no cell phone coverage at all down there, so at least we can call for help if we need to when we're down that way.

Yeah the maps are pretty bad. In fact, the AT&T coverage maps show the entire I75 route that you're on (generally speaking) as being covered, yet our frequent trips to Lexington have proven that approx 1/3 of that stretch between the 71/75 split and Lexington is Edge only. As a "soccer dad" I run into this all the time and when we start hearing the "Edge buzz" coming through the speakers, we switch to Airplane mode we switch from streaming Slacker to using the music we have on my phone. Oh well, I hope the increase in coverage in your area helps reduce the black hole between here and Lexington.

The map is pretty accurate for Grant County. That one little stretch below Crittenden and down to Scott County is the only section of I-75 in Edge, and of course that's where I live. Thankfully I work in Cold Spring, which just went LTE a few days ago.

 

[Kadman]

The map is pretty accurate for Grant County. That one little stretch below Crittenden and down to Scott County is the only section of I-75 in Edge, and of course that's where I live. Thankfully I work in Cold Spring, which just went LTE a few days ago.

Really? I had no idea Cold Spring was LTE already. I'm just South of there in Alexandria. If you see a guy buzzing around holding his phone up looking for an LTE signal, that would be me!

 

[SheepNutz]

Really? I had no idea Cold Spring was LTE already. I'm just South of there in Alexandria. If you see a guy buzzing around holding his phone up looking for an LTE signal, that would be me!

They flipped the switch on the cincinnati area a few days ago, and a coworker with an LTE windows phone confirmed that we had LTE at work in Cold Spring too. I'm pumped!

 

[DeftwillP]

Mexia Texas still is on edge. Just thought you should know.