Mine works fine indoors, I'm on AT&T and in an office building now with no reception issues. Your carrier plays as much of a roll as your radio.
Verizons frequency is better suited for indoors than AT&Ts. Tmobiles new 600mhz band 71 will greatly improve indoor reception for them.
So in an office building it's fine. But in a brick building i'll lose reception. Verizon signals, due to the lower(or is it higher?) frequencies, can penetrate better.
Tmobiles 600mhz frequency they say is 4x better at penetrating buildings. And the signal goes twice as far as their current frequencies but you need a phone that uses band 71 which the new iphones do. We'll see how they looks in the real world. Here's a list of current 600mhz supported cities for tmobile:
https://www.t-mobile.com/content/da...to-rico/T-Mobile-600-MHz-Cities-and-Towns.pdf
You're very confused. AT&T and Verizon both have low-band in most markets, unless you're in Eastern Oklahoma or parts of Nebraska where AT&T doesn't have low band other than the recently acquired B14.
Lower frequencies penetrate better, which is why AT&T and Verizon were ahead of Sprint and T-Mobile for so long. 600mhz isn't much better than 700mhz or 850mhz, they are comparing it to the B4 AWS 1700/2100 holdings which is fine for them, but not relevant to comparing to AT&T and Verizon.
Further, Qualcomm devices will hold a signal longer than Intel devices, and individual phones can vary in signal reception. Samsung used to suck, now they are top dog.
Because honestly there isn't much I want iPhone to do that it can't do with standard LTE.
You clearly don't understand what gigabit LTE does. It's not just about top speeds. 4x4 MIMO helps with weak area signal reception, and higher numbers of carriers aggregated deal with congestion more effectively. The problem is, the Intel radios perform poorly, so Qualcomm radios will still perform better.
Lower bands typically travel further, but aren't as fast - that's why carriers use a mix (not to mention what they're licensed to use in each area). There's also the question of Verizon's tower might just be closer to a building than an AT&T one.
There's also a lot of Qualcomm vs. Intel complaints on here and while there are some cases where Qualcomm modems might be better, it won't magically turn a zero-bars area into full. In some places, both will just have no service.
You're right in practical terms, but technically, lower frequency bands aren't any slower in theory than higher frequency, they just end up being used for devices that are indoors or at the cell's edge, which are less efficient, and sometimes in tough signal environments, many devices end up on those low bands, leaving the high bands with fewer users and more capacity for the devices that are close enough to pick those up.
Qualcomm radios aren't magic, but they will hold a usable data signal in many places that an Intel radio will not. Certainly not full bars, they're probably at one bar of LTE if the Intel iPhone has no service on the same carrier, but that one bar might be DSL-speed data, compared to the pre-internet days for the iPhone. Interestingly, in-car Wi-Fi systems that use LTE can often connect several miles farther out from a tower than even a Qualcomm phone due to their more powerful antennas that are mounted up higher, away from animals full of water like homo sapiens, and more powerful radios/amplifiers that are running off of the car's electrical system and thus don't have power efficiency considerations at play. They could effectively eliminate small gaps in coverage, but obviously if there's no tower anywhere nearby, at some point they will lose service.
My iPhoneX has been speed-testing fast.com 290-300mbps LTE since release. There is no story in going faster on a mobile device.
First of all, you're not always getting 250mbps+ on any phone unless you're in a very small area, and never leaving that area. In fact, you don't always have service on any phone on any carrier unless you never go much of anywhere. Most of the LTE networks are in the low double-digit range much of the time, and none of them even have coverage everywhere at all.
Secondly of all, you clearly don't get it. The Qualcomm X20 radio is not just about raw speed, it's about having a connection when other phones don't.
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Oh, absolutely - I think the urban vs rural thing for carriers will always have a few things at play - more potential customers in a service area means more $$$, but more actual customers in those areas also means that they have to be able to serve those customers with added capacity and such. I suspect many carriers are trying to figure out if coverage vs urban coverage is a better return on investment and that's lead to varying levels of service (T-Mobile has really done a lot for fast speeds in cities, and AT&T has left a big hole in Nebraska for years).
I have found that the low-density areas with decent coverage have led to interesting services—AT&T did a standalone 250GB or 500GB LTE data plan for $40 or $80 for rural areas and it appears to be automatically deprioritized automatically in denser environments (with good signal, it was hitting maybe 5Mbps at my place, but taking it to a family member's house where it was being used, they were getting 40Mbps). This particular plan was an amazing option compared with the 1.5Mbps DSL service. Obviously, there's some hacky ways to do home internet over cellular, but for a family member that just wants decent working internet at a reasonable price, it's a neat alternative. They've also done some fixed wireless services (I think runs on Band 30) in rural areas, too.
Yes, urban areas, especially ones that are growing quickly with a young and mobile population are just way more profitable. A small cell in a major metro market will often reach more potential customers than putting a 250' tower up in the middle of nowhere. That being said, AT&T and Verizon built their brand on having coverage in all sorts of places for when people travel, so people are willing to pay more to have coverage in rural areas, otherwise everyone would have gotten Sprint or T-Mobile.
AT&T relies heavily on roaming, like in Nebraska with Viaero. Their holes in Iowa and Wisconsin are totally inexcusable though. They literally could pick up the phone, tell USCC they want roaming turned on there, and they would have the problem solved with LTE. It's pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, AT&T has a lot of spectrum depth, and they did those plans, the Unlimited hotspot plans, the Unlimited iPad plans, and the FWI, which is a separate system that runs on B30 and is able to capture government subsidies for rural broadband. I've heard pretty bad things about it, but in theory it could be interesting, as it's more heavily sectorized than mobile, and uses much higher gain antennas. However, as of right now, for rural users, nothing beats the Unlimited iPad plan, where you just take the SIM card and put it in a hotspot.
