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Blown away by LTE

G

guru_ck

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 24, 2005
435
0
Bay Area, CA
I borrowed a Verizon Motorola Bionic from work for the weekend. I couldn't believe my eyes when I ran a speed test! I ran a dozen more all around the South Bay Area and results were pretty consistent. I have to admit that whenever Verizon implements something, they do it right. A prime example of that is when their website withstood the iPhone 4S preorder load last night. LTE looks very promising, unfortunately AT&T will just be getting started on their buildout by the time Verizon is done! Well anyway, cheers to new, faster technology!

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I am in an area that will probably be about the last to get LTE but they expect a complete roll out by end of 2013 :)
 
guru_ck said:
I borrowed a Verizon Motorola Bionic from work for the weekend. I couldn't believe my eyes when I ran a speed test! I ran a dozen more all around the South Bay Area and results were pretty consistent. I have to admit that whenever Verizon implements something, they do it right. A prime example of that is when their website withstood the iPhone 4S preorder load last night. LTE looks very promising, unfortunately AT&T will just be getting started on their buildout by the time Verizon is done! Well anyway, cheers to new, faster technology!

Image
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I agree that LTE is impressive, however, at this time, the network speed has ceased to be the bottleneck for most mobile devices. I've used 3-6mbps internet on my computer and it was plenty fast, but the same 3g speed on my phone feels slow...

There is a reason Apple is saying the iPhone 4S can RENDER pages up to twice as fast as the iPhone 4... because the bottleneck is in the processing.

I have 50mb/s internet at my house, when i do a wifi speed test on my phone it pulls about 26-30, on 3g it only gets 2-3. But for example loading a page like engadget, takes about 13 seconds on wifi, and about 16 on 3g, that's no where near the 10x difference in bandwidth.
 
AT&T already rolled out their LTE officially in late August. Although it only launched in five cities they did promise that ten more markets would be added by the end of 2011.
 
All that bandwidth speed with a bandwidth limiter. What's the point? I'm sure you will hit the 2GB or 5GB limit faster than you can hit the stop download button.
 
iPadThai said:
All that bandwidth speed with a bandwidth limiter. What's the point? I'm sure you will hit the 2GB or 5GB limit faster than you can hit the stop download button.
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I don't understand why people always claim this. A higher bandwidth doesn't magically consume more data than slower speeds. It'll just help you get done a bit faster. After upgrading my Comcast speeds from 12 to 50mbps my data consumption increased marginally, less than 5%. If you have a hard time reaching your data cap I don't expect having LTE speeds will cause users to use substantially more data.
 
It's not about the bandwidth. The latency difference is what makes LTE seem much snappier than 3G
 
Look the that ping time. 40ms also.

In my opinion ping time matters more than overall download speeds.

With Verizon LTE now. You get the best of both worlds. Super fast ping time plus super fast downloads. That's a deadly combination for speed.

If the iPhone or when the iPhone gets LTE I will jump from ATT to Verizon if ATT doesn't have it in my area. I don't care about the massive ETF on y four lines because I can just sell the iPhones to pay it off.
 
Stealthipad said:
LTE will be on the iPhone 5.

There is be no unlimited plan grandfathered in:eek:
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That's one of the reasons I didn't upgrade from my iPhone 4 because I feel the iPhone 4S isn't a total upgrade. I'm happy with my iPhone 4.

There are a couple of scenario about unlimited LTE data.

My opinion about LTE in reality isn't about speed. LTE isn't necessarily for the consumer per se. In VZW case they have deploy LTE because of their CDMA network. AT&T doesn't really need to rush LTE because their network transition to LTE is sort of a natural transition because of their network technology.

My layman opinion for LTE is to create an empty highway to rid congestion because of increasing data use on smartphones. So it's not really about speed it's more about less congestion. I think the emphasis on speed is a bunch of hype because it's not necessarily the purpose per se.

I would like to assume that AT&T as an example would want customers to get on their LTE network because of the above and the incentive would be to offer unlimited LTE data to existing unlimited 3G data customers.

I can almost VZW offered their current unlimited data customers unlimited LTE for the same reason so they can get off their old network and get onto the empty highway.
 
Amnesia87 said:
I have 50mb/s internet at my house, when i do a wifi speed test on my phone it pulls about 26-30, on 3g it only gets 2-3. But for example loading a page like engadget, takes about 13 seconds on wifi, and about 16 on 3g, that's no where near the 10x difference in bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Also just because your home internet is 50MB/s doesn't necessarily mean that is the speeds you get their is the routers speed and the speed of the server you are downloading from. My point is engadgets servers my only be capable of 3-4mb/s as that is all the speed really necessary for loading a site.
 
Other than in speed test results, where do you see the differences in LTE?

Maybe in video watching (which if course is the kind of thing that will cause data cap issues).

The way I use my phone, I don't care about LTE until the battery life improves...
 
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