8 ms·

Finnish Carrier Sets New World Record for 4G Download Speeds

75 points by bemmu 10y ago

martinko 10y ago
> And the rest of the world could soon behave a lot more like the Finns do. The core issue here is the lack of fiber-connected base stations. The vast majority of them globally are connected with microwave connections that will not be able to handle 1gbps speeds for multiple users at once. This is a rather significant issue, as laying fiber from the backhaul (sometimes even backbone) network requires a lot of earthwork, the fiber needs to be laid underground and active infrastructure also needs to be deployed. I don't see this happening anytime soon.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering and it's not like this service is available everywhere across Finland. Having a small population and only a few highly populated metropolitan areas make it easy. Providing 1gbps cellular connection in NYC isn't really possible, Helsinki on the other hand is doable. As for the rural areas they aren't covered in Finland and even if a few are the size of the country also plays a role because good luck getting 1gig cell towers across Nebraska.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    > Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering Except the excuse you hear from Americans in every single thread about mobile tech is "Oh but the US has such a low population density! Obviously our service must be crap and cost a shitload!"
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Population density is misleading because it's usually calculated based on total land area, total private land area, total resdential build up etc. Overall the US is in an odd position where tha large cities are too populated and the suburban metropolitan areas tend to be considerably less dense due to primarily single family housing over fairly large land plots. Combine that with NIMBY mentality and the overall geographic scale and you don't get the best environment for rapidly deploying infrastructure.
      - kalleboo 10y ago
        The problem is all regulatory. You have other countries with really insane population distributions like Australia, but they have some vague semblance of competition (I'm definitely not claiming the Australian market is sane by any stretch) so people who need rural coverage get the expensive but very high quality Telstra network, but people who never leave the cities can get unlimited data on more focused carriers. The US get the worst of all worlds.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Could be, but then again Finland has like what 2 carriers? Elisa and Tellia something. Elisa is effectively the BT/AT&T/BELL of Finland.
        Jommi 10y ago
        Elisa, Sonera, DNA + regional ones. Elisa has the widest coverage, they havebeen buying out regional ones.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Sonara is Telia, didn't knew about DNA I know that some of the islands and the more remote areas have had setup coop telephone/internet companies but overall there isn't much "competition" as far as number of companies go. If you exclude MVNO's most countries have pretty similar number of mobile and broadband providers.
        ptaipale 10y ago
        I disagree about that lack of competition: Finland was actually a pioneer in deregulation of telecom services in 1980's-1990's and that was a partial reason for the great success of Nokia since that. The company learned how to deal with operators that are competing on a market. Deregulation followed later in many European countries and throughout the world. There are three physical countrywide LTE/3G/GSM networks in Finland: Telia/Sonera, Elisa and DNA. They then carry some MVNOs so there are more places where you can actually buy a SIM card than just these three. Most people buy their phone here separately from the operator contract, so there are much fewer contract phones than e.g. in the U.S. Thus there is competition for phone sales, and competition for operator contracts, separately. Telia/Sonera is the former state monopoly, Elisa grew out of Helsinki telephone association/company, and DNA is a merger of small countryside operators. Sonera has the best coverage throughout the country, DNA curiously enough has the best coverage in urban areas. Of course, we can still always say that there is not enough competition between operators, as their prices tend to converge. Consumer advocates usually have only two kinds of messages: either all prices are nearly the same ("competition is not working!") or there are large disparities in prices ("competition is not working!").
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Finland is 1.7x larger geographically than Nebraska, and its population is 2.8x larger. So while Nebraska is certainly somewhat more sparsely populated, the difference isn't huge.
  - legulere 10y ago
    I can't talk about Finland, but in Sweden I was really surprised how far I could wander from civilisation and still get 4G, Edge was pretty rare. Much better than what I get here in Germany and also cheaper. (I shouldn't complain though, I'm using heavily throttled internet for free)
    - kiiski 10y ago
      > I can't talk about Finland Here's a map for the carrier in question: https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/ https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/
  - Maakuth 10y ago
    As a Finn I generally get decent connectivity mostly anywhere. The rural town I live in has 7000 residents and all the three networks have decent 4G coverage here. Certainly not 1Gbps, but always tens of Mbps. Pretty much wherever I go, I have at least 3G connectivity from maybe 2Mbps upwards. This basically anywhere except some areas of Lapland wilderness, where nobody lives. This costs around 20€/month, 30€ if you want unlimited calls and sms.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      That ain't that different than most rural US. And I'm not sure 7000 is considered very rural in Finland, Vaala is probably less than half than that and I'm not sure how "rural" in the grand scheme of things that it is, it's not Iceland where you can have 50 people and be considered a town.
  - martinko 10y ago
    Yeah, this is what 5g 'promises' to solve (I've heard about applications in Singapore and NY), despite the fact that no one has actually defined what 5g is.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      I don't see how exactly is that solvable, sure it would help but by how much? 3g/4g/5g is pretty nonsense, you can have 3.5g HSDPA/HSUPA providing considerably higher speeds than 4g it's all circumstantial. Covering a large metropolitan area is hard, tons of people, tons of high buildings and abstraction that make LOS pain in the ass, tons of shadows and reflections due to glass/steel construction and almost impossible to do large infrastructure project because opening a main road in a central city is a huge PITA, add to that all the people that do not want transmitters on their property, in LOS of them, near the school, near the hospital, near the playground and you get a pretty shitty situation. Sure there are things that some better regulation or incentives might solve but in the grand scheme of things not everything is scalable when you take it from a city of 500,000 to a city of 12M.
  - dboreham 10y ago
    Nobody is providing a 1Gbps cell connection anywhere -- this article is marketing hype. They didn't provide 1Gbps "in Finland", they provided it "in their lab" (which could as well have been in NYC). Population density is a red herring -- deliverable service speed has much more to do with the amount of money the carrier wants to spend on provisioning service than the population density. fwiw: I travel quite a bit and the fastest LTE service I've tested has been in Tokyo (high population density) @ 52M/23M. meanwhile, here in Montana (low population density) I usually see around 20M/15M.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      The fastest LTE service I've seen was in Kempsey, Australia (Pop. 28,000) where I clocked 130 MBit/s down on a prepaid SIM
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    Here in Lithuania the population is also very sparse outside the big cities, but I have no issues getting a full 4G signal even in remote countryside. The land here is rather flat which obviously helps, but the country also has the highest FTTH percentage in Europe so they must be doing something right :-)
- jpeg_hero 10y ago
  What kind of fiber could you even provision to the base station? 50gbit? 100gbit? Is that even possible?
  - detaro 10y ago
    10, 40 and 100 Gbit/s are common fiber speeds (as in, you can buy standardized parts from multiple vendors), but at least 100GbE is properly expensive (something in my brain says +100k€ per interface, but that figure probably is a few years old). And that's per individual fiberpair & wavelength, so it is easy to bundle up multiple channels. I assume the quoted wireless speeds are for a single client under perfect conditions, what summed up bandwidth can a single tower support with multiple clients? 10 or 40G probably go a long way already.
    - X-Istence 10y ago
      100 GbE isn't that expensive. Transceivers for 100 GbE are in the $800 per port or so. CDW sells Proline 100 GbE transceivers for $300 a pop. It's a standard QSFP28 interface that is used for most of them. It carries 4x 25 GbE across the fibres. They also make 100 GbE DAC cables. Longer distances do cost more... Just looking around I found some 100GBASE-LR4 transceivers going for $6k a pop from Finisair... but at least you get to continue using your single mode fiber ;-)
  - runeks 10y ago
    If you're digging in the ground anyway, why not multiple fiber strands, and as many empty tubes as you can fit in there too? The digging is what costs (at least here in Denmark), not the materials.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    I'm not arguing that we should use submarine style cables for base stations, but so you know what's possible: those cables (about 1 inch diameter) routinely do terabits per second.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    You can get 10G Ethernet SFP+ modules using OM3 fiber for $100 these days. 12 strand outdoor fiber sells for $0.33/ft. Yes, neither of these is what you'd use as a backhaul link between cell sites, but it gives you an idea when you can do 60G over 300m distance for under $1,500 all in (assuming you already have SFP+ capable hardware at both ends). As others have stated, LR grade hardware has came way down in price just like the SR stuff has.
elipsey 10y ago
Great, now I can burn through my data cap in 8.42 seconds
- finspin 10y ago
  Not really an issue in Finland since the standard mobile phone plan comes with unlimited data.
shambala 10y ago
What's the point? We won't see this in the USA for another 10 years, if ever. These articles only serve to feed a Scandinavian fetish-food is better, culture is better, blah blah.
jpalomaki 10y ago
This same carrier just some days ago issued a statement on average their mobile data customer used 13GB of traffic in August. http://corporate.elisa.com/press-releases/bulletin/?id=41240826956117&tag=corporate.elisa.com%3Apress http://corporate.elisa.com/press-releases/bulletin/?id=41240...
dboreham 10y ago
Rule of thumb: carriers actually deliver, once users are up and running on the service (not the first day after deployment), around 1/10 of whatever speed they mention in press releases.
- nordify 10y ago
  You are sorely mistaken with regards to Finland. Regulation in Finland defines what broadband speeds are acceptable. This includes mobile broadband. Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds using a 4 hour average or a minimum of 40% of top speeds at any time. And this regulation is enforced.
  - mnarayan01 10y ago
    Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds [...] I assume that's advertised top speeds?
    - nordify 10y ago
      Yes.
  - dboreham 10y ago
    For wireless service? That makes no sense. They would have to have regulated different laws of physics.
imaginenore 10y ago
Here (in one of the EU countries) we have a strange situation when 4G is 20+ Mbps, but out home DSL maxes out at 2.5 Mbps. We're thinking of switching over to 4G, but it's only unlimited at night.
TorKlingberg 10y ago
I have worked in the field, so I may be able to answer some questions. As always, real-world speed will no be this high any time soon. This is a lab demo which is very different from reality. They do specify the techniques they used: * Five-carrier aggregation: Each LTE carrier uses up to 20 MHz, so this uses 100 MHz of bandwidth dedicated to a single user. Bandwidth in the air is scarce and many carriers do not have that much in total. LTE is expanding into higher frequencies (towards 5GHz) where there is more BW available, but the range is shorter. * 256 QAM: This requires very good receivers and extremely low background noise and interference. * 4x4 MIMO: MIMO is quite magic and unpredictable, even more so than radio signal propagation in general. For 4x4 to work the phone needs to have four separate antennas, and they need to be separated enough to receive different combinations of signals from the four transmitter antennas. 2x2 MIMO is common and works if you are close enough to the base station and get lucky with the angles and signal reflections.
davidf18 10y ago
A few minutes ago I just ran a Speediest on my iPhone 6s+ in Manhattan near a busy intersection on the Upper West Side. 47.6 Mbps download / 23 Mbps upload I use Verizon, which has deployed LTE-Advanced which allows for the carrier aggregation of different data streams on different spectrums. My phone uses the Qualcomm MDM 9635 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7 The Samsung Galaxy S7 uses the more advanced 9645 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12 Honestly, I don't know why I need > 45 Mbits/ sec download and 23 Mbits/sec upload. I don't seem to have problems at all with Verizon, even with the tall buildings. What I do have problems with is the high cost of the service which does much to explain why people don't use more bandwidth on Verizon and use more on WiFi. I would much prefer lower costs for Verizon data usage than higher download speeds.
- icelancer 10y ago
  I get 50/20 on Tmo in the Seattle/Bellevue area which is to be expected, given their corporate structure is largely based here (for US operations). But I agree; the speeds are largely irrelevant considering I am only getting 5 GB/month at those speeds and EDGE/2G speeds otherwise. Would vastly prefer 10/5 or 10/2 or something with near-unlimited data.
  - davidf18 10y ago
    Just curious. What is your handset? Wondering which modem you have.
    - icelancer 10y ago
      The new Huawei Nexus 6P. Switched from an iPhone 6+ but I had similar speeds on both devices.
      - davidf18 10y ago
        I think that uses the Snapdragon 810 which has a better modem than the iPhone 6s/6s+ which has a Category 6 modem. Your phone, the 6P has a Category 9: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810
vmp 10y ago
> The standard mobile phone plan in Finland comes with unlimited data, and carriers differentiate their services based on speed. Meanwhile in Germany, providers ask ~8 euros per month for a 14.4-50 Mbit/s "flatrate" with 1Gb traffic limit... they do provide "unlimited" traffic as advertised but once you consume more than that you are restricted to ISDN speeds (about 64kbit/s). The marketing guys came up with the word "high-speed volume" so they don't need to refer to this as a "limit". Really scummy practices if you ask me. :( Although the average person may be content with 1Gb of data per month, what use could 64kbit/s have in 2016 (other than texts and narrowband voip ("Call your friends like its 1999™")?
- Gracana 10y ago
  Same in the US. It amazes me that it's legal, it doesn't match any reasonable interpretation of the word.
- ioltas 10y ago
  Japan is getting to that as well these days. A couple of companies are popping up, outlining that they get the price down with such offers while maintaining the connection speed... Up to a certain limit.
- germanier 10y ago
  German carriers paid more than 700 € per resident (including non-users like children and elderly) during multiple spectrum auctions in the last 16 years just for the right to transmit mobile internet over the air – much more than in most other places (US carriers paid less than half per resident as far as I know, Austrian less than a fifth). That money has to be earned somewhere.

75 points by bemmu 10y ago

> And the rest of the world could soon behave a lot more like the Finns do. The core issue here is the lack of fiber-connected base stations. The vast majority of them globally are connected with microwave connections that will not be able to handle 1gbps speeds for multiple users at once. This is a rather significant issue, as laying fiber from the backhaul (sometimes even backbone) network requires a lot of earthwork, the fiber needs to be laid underground and active infrastructure also needs to be deployed. I don't see this happening anytime soon.

dogma1138 10y ago
Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering and it's not like this service is available everywhere across Finland. Having a small population and only a few highly populated metropolitan areas make it easy. Providing 1gbps cellular connection in NYC isn't really possible, Helsinki on the other hand is doable. As for the rural areas they aren't covered in Finland and even if a few are the size of the country also plays a role because good luck getting 1gig cell towers across Nebraska.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering Except the excuse you hear from Americans in every single thread about mobile tech is "Oh but the US has such a low population density! Obviously our service must be crap and cost a shitload!"
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Population density is misleading because it's usually calculated based on total land area, total private land area, total resdential build up etc. Overall the US is in an odd position where tha large cities are too populated and the suburban metropolitan areas tend to be considerably less dense due to primarily single family housing over fairly large land plots. Combine that with NIMBY mentality and the overall geographic scale and you don't get the best environment for rapidly deploying infrastructure.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      The problem is all regulatory. You have other countries with really insane population distributions like Australia, but they have some vague semblance of competition (I'm definitely not claiming the Australian market is sane by any stretch) so people who need rural coverage get the expensive but very high quality Telstra network, but people who never leave the cities can get unlimited data on more focused carriers. The US get the worst of all worlds.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        Could be, but then again Finland has like what 2 carriers? Elisa and Tellia something. Elisa is effectively the BT/AT&T/BELL of Finland.
        Jommi 10y ago
        Elisa, Sonera, DNA + regional ones. Elisa has the widest coverage, they havebeen buying out regional ones.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Sonara is Telia, didn't knew about DNA I know that some of the islands and the more remote areas have had setup coop telephone/internet companies but overall there isn't much "competition" as far as number of companies go. If you exclude MVNO's most countries have pretty similar number of mobile and broadband providers.
        ptaipale 10y ago
        I disagree about that lack of competition: Finland was actually a pioneer in deregulation of telecom services in 1980's-1990's and that was a partial reason for the great success of Nokia since that. The company learned how to deal with operators that are competing on a market. Deregulation followed later in many European countries and throughout the world. There are three physical countrywide LTE/3G/GSM networks in Finland: Telia/Sonera, Elisa and DNA. They then carry some MVNOs so there are more places where you can actually buy a SIM card than just these three. Most people buy their phone here separately from the operator contract, so there are much fewer contract phones than e.g. in the U.S. Thus there is competition for phone sales, and competition for operator contracts, separately. Telia/Sonera is the former state monopoly, Elisa grew out of Helsinki telephone association/company, and DNA is a merger of small countryside operators. Sonera has the best coverage throughout the country, DNA curiously enough has the best coverage in urban areas. Of course, we can still always say that there is not enough competition between operators, as their prices tend to converge. Consumer advocates usually have only two kinds of messages: either all prices are nearly the same ("competition is not working!") or there are large disparities in prices ("competition is not working!").
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- pavlov 10y ago
  Finland is 1.7x larger geographically than Nebraska, and its population is 2.8x larger. So while Nebraska is certainly somewhat more sparsely populated, the difference isn't huge.
- legulere 10y ago
  I can't talk about Finland, but in Sweden I was really surprised how far I could wander from civilisation and still get 4G, Edge was pretty rare. Much better than what I get here in Germany and also cheaper. (I shouldn't complain though, I'm using heavily throttled internet for free)
  - kiiski 10y ago
    > I can't talk about Finland Here's a map for the carrier in question: https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/ https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/
- Maakuth 10y ago
  As a Finn I generally get decent connectivity mostly anywhere. The rural town I live in has 7000 residents and all the three networks have decent 4G coverage here. Certainly not 1Gbps, but always tens of Mbps. Pretty much wherever I go, I have at least 3G connectivity from maybe 2Mbps upwards. This basically anywhere except some areas of Lapland wilderness, where nobody lives. This costs around 20€/month, 30€ if you want unlimited calls and sms.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    That ain't that different than most rural US. And I'm not sure 7000 is considered very rural in Finland, Vaala is probably less than half than that and I'm not sure how "rural" in the grand scheme of things that it is, it's not Iceland where you can have 50 people and be considered a town.
- martinko 10y ago
  Yeah, this is what 5g 'promises' to solve (I've heard about applications in Singapore and NY), despite the fact that no one has actually defined what 5g is.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    I don't see how exactly is that solvable, sure it would help but by how much? 3g/4g/5g is pretty nonsense, you can have 3.5g HSDPA/HSUPA providing considerably higher speeds than 4g it's all circumstantial. Covering a large metropolitan area is hard, tons of people, tons of high buildings and abstraction that make LOS pain in the ass, tons of shadows and reflections due to glass/steel construction and almost impossible to do large infrastructure project because opening a main road in a central city is a huge PITA, add to that all the people that do not want transmitters on their property, in LOS of them, near the school, near the hospital, near the playground and you get a pretty shitty situation. Sure there are things that some better regulation or incentives might solve but in the grand scheme of things not everything is scalable when you take it from a city of 500,000 to a city of 12M.
- dboreham 10y ago
  Nobody is providing a 1Gbps cell connection anywhere -- this article is marketing hype. They didn't provide 1Gbps "in Finland", they provided it "in their lab" (which could as well have been in NYC). Population density is a red herring -- deliverable service speed has much more to do with the amount of money the carrier wants to spend on provisioning service than the population density. fwiw: I travel quite a bit and the fastest LTE service I've tested has been in Tokyo (high population density) @ 52M/23M. meanwhile, here in Montana (low population density) I usually see around 20M/15M.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    The fastest LTE service I've seen was in Kempsey, Australia (Pop. 28,000) where I clocked 130 MBit/s down on a prepaid SIM
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  Here in Lithuania the population is also very sparse outside the big cities, but I have no issues getting a full 4G signal even in remote countryside. The land here is rather flat which obviously helps, but the country also has the highest FTTH percentage in Europe so they must be doing something right :-)
jpeg_hero 10y ago
What kind of fiber could you even provision to the base station? 50gbit? 100gbit? Is that even possible?
- detaro 10y ago
  10, 40 and 100 Gbit/s are common fiber speeds (as in, you can buy standardized parts from multiple vendors), but at least 100GbE is properly expensive (something in my brain says +100k€ per interface, but that figure probably is a few years old). And that's per individual fiberpair & wavelength, so it is easy to bundle up multiple channels. I assume the quoted wireless speeds are for a single client under perfect conditions, what summed up bandwidth can a single tower support with multiple clients? 10 or 40G probably go a long way already.
  - X-Istence 10y ago
    100 GbE isn't that expensive. Transceivers for 100 GbE are in the $800 per port or so. CDW sells Proline 100 GbE transceivers for $300 a pop. It's a standard QSFP28 interface that is used for most of them. It carries 4x 25 GbE across the fibres. They also make 100 GbE DAC cables. Longer distances do cost more... Just looking around I found some 100GBASE-LR4 transceivers going for $6k a pop from Finisair... but at least you get to continue using your single mode fiber ;-)
- runeks 10y ago
  If you're digging in the ground anyway, why not multiple fiber strands, and as many empty tubes as you can fit in there too? The digging is what costs (at least here in Denmark), not the materials.
- tbihl 10y ago
  I'm not arguing that we should use submarine style cables for base stations, but so you know what's possible: those cables (about 1 inch diameter) routinely do terabits per second.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  You can get 10G Ethernet SFP+ modules using OM3 fiber for $100 these days. 12 strand outdoor fiber sells for $0.33/ft. Yes, neither of these is what you'd use as a backhaul link between cell sites, but it gives you an idea when you can do 60G over 300m distance for under $1,500 all in (assuming you already have SFP+ capable hardware at both ends). As others have stated, LR grade hardware has came way down in price just like the SR stuff has.

elipsey 10y ago

Great, now I can burn through my data cap in 8.42 seconds

finspin 10y ago
Not really an issue in Finland since the standard mobile phone plan comes with unlimited data.

shambala 10y ago

What's the point? We won't see this in the USA for another 10 years, if ever. These articles only serve to feed a Scandinavian fetish-food is better, culture is better, blah blah.

jpalomaki 10y ago

This same carrier just some days ago issued a statement on average their mobile data customer used 13GB of traffic in August. http://corporate.elisa.com/press-releases/bulletin/?id=41240826956117&tag=corporate.elisa.com%3Apress http://corporate.elisa.com/press-releases/bulletin/?id=41240...

dboreham 10y ago

Rule of thumb: carriers actually deliver, once users are up and running on the service (not the first day after deployment), around 1/10 of whatever speed they mention in press releases.

nordify 10y ago
You are sorely mistaken with regards to Finland. Regulation in Finland defines what broadband speeds are acceptable. This includes mobile broadband. Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds using a 4 hour average or a minimum of 40% of top speeds at any time. And this regulation is enforced.
- mnarayan01 10y ago
  Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds [...] I assume that's advertised top speeds?
  - nordify 10y ago
    Yes.
- dboreham 10y ago
  For wireless service? That makes no sense. They would have to have regulated different laws of physics.

imaginenore 10y ago

Here (in one of the EU countries) we have a strange situation when 4G is 20+ Mbps, but out home DSL maxes out at 2.5 Mbps. We're thinking of switching over to 4G, but it's only unlimited at night.

TorKlingberg 10y ago

I have worked in the field, so I may be able to answer some questions. As always, real-world speed will no be this high any time soon. This is a lab demo which is very different from reality. They do specify the techniques they used: * Five-carrier aggregation: Each LTE carrier uses up to 20 MHz, so this uses 100 MHz of bandwidth dedicated to a single user. Bandwidth in the air is scarce and many carriers do not have that much in total. LTE is expanding into higher frequencies (towards 5GHz) where there is more BW available, but the range is shorter. * 256 QAM: This requires very good receivers and extremely low background noise and interference. * 4x4 MIMO: MIMO is quite magic and unpredictable, even more so than radio signal propagation in general. For 4x4 to work the phone needs to have four separate antennas, and they need to be separated enough to receive different combinations of signals from the four transmitter antennas. 2x2 MIMO is common and works if you are close enough to the base station and get lucky with the angles and signal reflections.

davidf18 10y ago

A few minutes ago I just ran a Speediest on my iPhone 6s+ in Manhattan near a busy intersection on the Upper West Side. 47.6 Mbps download / 23 Mbps upload I use Verizon, which has deployed LTE-Advanced which allows for the carrier aggregation of different data streams on different spectrums. My phone uses the Qualcomm MDM 9635 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7 The Samsung Galaxy S7 uses the more advanced 9645 modem: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12 Honestly, I don't know why I need > 45 Mbits/ sec download and 23 Mbits/sec upload. I don't seem to have problems at all with Verizon, even with the tall buildings. What I do have problems with is the high cost of the service which does much to explain why people don't use more bandwidth on Verizon and use more on WiFi. I would much prefer lower costs for Verizon data usage than higher download speeds.

icelancer 10y ago
I get 50/20 on Tmo in the Seattle/Bellevue area which is to be expected, given their corporate structure is largely based here (for US operations). But I agree; the speeds are largely irrelevant considering I am only getting 5 GB/month at those speeds and EDGE/2G speeds otherwise. Would vastly prefer 10/5 or 10/2 or something with near-unlimited data.
- davidf18 10y ago
  Just curious. What is your handset? Wondering which modem you have.
  - icelancer 10y ago
    The new Huawei Nexus 6P. Switched from an iPhone 6+ but I had similar speeds on both devices.
    - davidf18 10y ago
      I think that uses the Snapdragon 810 which has a better modem than the iPhone 6s/6s+ which has a Category 6 modem. Your phone, the 6P has a Category 9: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810

vmp 10y ago

> The standard mobile phone plan in Finland comes with unlimited data, and carriers differentiate their services based on speed. Meanwhile in Germany, providers ask ~8 euros per month for a 14.4-50 Mbit/s "flatrate" with 1Gb traffic limit... they do provide "unlimited" traffic as advertised but once you consume more than that you are restricted to ISDN speeds (about 64kbit/s). The marketing guys came up with the word "high-speed volume" so they don't need to refer to this as a "limit". Really scummy practices if you ask me. :( Although the average person may be content with 1Gb of data per month, what use could 64kbit/s have in 2016 (other than texts and narrowband voip ("Call your friends like its 1999™")?

Gracana 10y ago
Same in the US. It amazes me that it's legal, it doesn't match any reasonable interpretation of the word.
ioltas 10y ago
Japan is getting to that as well these days. A couple of companies are popping up, outlining that they get the price down with such offers while maintaining the connection speed... Up to a certain limit.
germanier 10y ago
German carriers paid more than 700 € per resident (including non-users like children and elderly) during multiple spectrum auctions in the last 16 years just for the right to transmit mobile internet over the air – much more than in most other places (US carriers paid less than half per resident as far as I know, Austrian less than a fifth). That money has to be earned somewhere.