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LTE Has Slowed by 50% in the US This Year

492 points by wkoszek 10y ago

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Excellent timing considering the HN thread [1] about T-Mobile being fined for network management. "There is no doubt that the US will need to set up the infrastructure to keep pace with the rapid changes in usage and content expected in the future. Like any instance of supply and demand, we will continue to see a give and take in this market. As operators catch up to the current demand and LTE becomes faster, users will opt to use it over others – thus creating greater demand, supply scarcity, and decreased performance. At which point the cycle will begin again." TL;DR Expect more network management in the future due to heavy demand of a constrained resource. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745255
- wkoszek 10y ago
  Yeah. Saw this other article in the front page of HN and it inspired me to post this one too.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  *fined for misleading customers about network management
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Your average user doesn't care, as long as they're not charged extra for exceeding their quota.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      The quotas on wireless ISPs are already very low and people exceed them very regularly. What can be done to actually improve the situation? What choice do consumers have?
      - Pigo 10y ago
        They'll take my grand-fathered-in unlimited plan from my cold, dead hands... Actually one more contract-violating rate increase and I'll probably be forced to give it up. The only way I still justify it is everyone is paying an arm and a leg to Verizonopoly in my area.
      - whamlastxmas 10y ago
        Voting for representatives that actually represent people and not corporations.
        andrei_says_ 10y ago
        Which means voting for people supporting election financing reform.
        whamlastxmas 10y ago
        I had this thought earlier: how about just electing people who don't give in to corporate lobbying. Keep corporate donations legal, I don't care, just actually look at the disclosure forms of where their money is coming from and don't vote for them if you disagree with conflicts of interest. Or if they have PACs that aren't transparent, don't vote for them. People are unable to make their voting decisions outside of the TV commercials and news articles they read, so I don't have any real hope for this tactic.
      - comex 10y ago
        But consumers do have a choice, at least in the US. T-Mobile offers unlimited data plans, and although they were just fined by the FCC for deprioritizing heavy data users in cases of congestion, that's still a significant improvement over standard data caps. (At least T-Mobile never did what AT&T used to do before they were sued, throttling users who weren't connected to congested towers.) Some web searching shows that Sprint just recently started up a similar offering. Sure, the more favorable terms come at the expense of network quality compared to Verizon or AT&T, but they're not that bad and that's the nature of competition...
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  >There is no doubt that the US will need to set up the infrastructure to keep pace with the rapid changes in usage and content expected in the future. I feel like we've been here before. It's almost like it's 1996 again with the Telecommunications Act. Our infrastructure is bullshit and it's making the US economy fall behind its peers. No worries! Instead of actually directly fixing the problem, let's give away all the power to corporations to fix as long as they super-pinky-swear to meet infrastructure goals. Of course we all know how this ends - they didn't meet those goals, service stagnated even more, there was never any recourse, and we've axed the option to directly fix the problem. How convenient for ISP stakeholders in 1996.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  ...due to heavy demand of an artificially constrained resource. If this worked the way free-market idolizers like to pretend there'd be competitors driving prices down and features/capabilities up. But none of that is happening.
franciscop 10y ago
A quick reminder that 4G != LTE. The 4G specification requires a minimum speed [1] so LTE was launched to avoid exactly this minimum. It seems that the companies did it right by launching LTE instead of 4G as they could have lost their 4G status, while now they could drop as low as 3G speeds and still be called LTE (which is ironic on itself). This wasn't commented at all in the article, using 4G and LTE interchangeably which I find troubling. [1] 100Mbit/s for high-speed transit areas and 1GBit/s for low-speed transit areas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_understanding
- mhurron 10y ago
  > using 4G and LTE interchangeably which I find troubling It follows the colloquial usage though.
  - grecy 10y ago
    > It follows the colloquial usage though. ....set by Marketers working for Cell phone companies who are very happy to trick you into thinking you have a faster service than you do. Source: Worked for a cell phone company that was ecstatic to roll out new towers and tout "4G for all". They were LTE towers, with a back haul incapable of 3G speeds.
- mherdeg 10y ago
  My go-to reference on the situation is https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/essay_3g_and_me https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/essay_3g_and_me. Like Keith says, more important than whether you have 3G, 4G, or LTE is: ""How much spectrum has the carrier licensed in my city, and how much is allocated to this kind of modulation? How many other people am I sharing the local tower with? In other words, how big is my cell, and how many towers has the carrier built or contracted with? How much throughput are my cellmates trying to consume? How much throughput has the carrier built in its back-end network connecting to the tower? You might notice that all of these meat-and-potatoes factors involve the carrier spending money, and they all involve gradual improvement in behind-the-scenes infrastructure that's hard to get customers excited. Persuading you to buy a new cell phone with a sophisticated modem and sign up for a two-year contract is a different story. So they don't sell you something measurable where they could be held accountable; they sell how sweet it feels to be using a sophisticated radio modem protocol to talk to them. … If the carrier sold you "384 kbps Internet access anywhere in the coverage area, outdoors," that would be something you could hold them accountable for. The carrier might even have to put a brake on signing up new customers until it could build new towers or license more spectrum for everybody to share, if it made that guarantee.""
mjevans 10y ago
I think that control of content is one of the major reasons for this. If users were more able to readily (and for zero cost to them) cache content when connected to local networks then we would see less content transferred over 'higher cost' networks. Of course streaming services (I'm thinking more of Twitch than Netflix) for live content production are 'rather difficult to cache' in their prime viewing time.
- bsder 10y ago
  The thing most difficult to cache is the thing that all the providers most want: advertising. If you removed the advertising from the web, caching gets really easy except for something like Twitch.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mschuster91 10y ago
What I don't get is: why can't I as an app developer specify what kind of data transfer rate I need and have the phone choose which connection type it needs depending on the currently running software? Like, if I'm doing push notifications or IRC, I'd tell the phone that I only need 2G speeds, and the phone only connects to something faster than 2G if I open the web browser. Right now, my phone books into LTE as soon as it's in coverage mode - and it stays there, eating power like nothing else, instead of dropping into the relatively quiet and strong-signal 2G/3G/HSxPA cells and saving power.
- gergles 10y ago
  Your phone is actually far more battery-efficient when it's able to only use LTE (i.e., if your carrier supports Voice over LTE). It's having to have both radios on (one for voice and one for data) that is hard on the battery.
  - joecool1029 10y ago
    Not exactly. When it's on LTE and doesn't support voLTE, the signaling is used here to search, connect, and handoff to HSPA or GSM (or CDMA). It increases the call setup time, but it isn't actually a major factor in battery life. GSM will win most in battery efficiency due to it being a TDMA based standard that pulses the radio off and on. But LTE has improved a long way since the early days.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      UMTS and HSPA were fine on battery life and they were CDMA technologies. The big difference is the extra work basebands have to do to handle new modulation technologies as well as the extra CPU time it takes to handle more data. More efficient CMOS processes, baseband designs as well as ARM core designs have been the main cause behind power efficiency in LTE-enabled devices.
      - joecool1029 10y ago
        Maybe you remember a different history than I do. WCDMA/HSPA was poorly designed early on to tackle smartphones and had terrible battery life and performance. To summarize pre-2012 HSPA: - Basically, HSPA phones until around 2011 or so stayed in a higher power state much longer than they should have. - People got pissy about having crap battery life. - Manufacturers responded by doing proprietary hacks to send modem into lower power state. - Cell networks essentially got DDOS'd as phones sent nonstop signaling to negotiate different power states. - Phones now not only got poor battery life, but also barely operated on the now congested network.. remember the at&t iphone monopoly days before 2012 in major cities, it was a bad time. 3GPP Rel8 came about to fix the issue for good by moving power state control to the towers. Here's an article explaining the technicals of it: http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2010/10/fast-dormancy-in-release-8.html http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2010/10/fast-dormancy-in-release-8.ht... Easier read: http://www.3glteinfo.com/fast-dormancy-in-3gpp/ http://www.3glteinfo.com/fast-dormancy-in-3gpp/ Would agree though that process size and baseband optimization is helping the LTE situation. Differences are very small and Apple actually quotes better LTE life on the SE than 3G. LTE really came into its own in just the past 2 years.
timmaah 10y ago
I've noticed it big time in the northeast. I live on the road and work via a Verizon connection. Over the last 6 months over 7 or 8 locations I get a full Verizon signal (with a booster) and very low speeds compared to a year ago. And speeds increasing at off peak times (it's fast in the middle of the night) point to overloaded towers. I know people love to hate on cell companies but it must be hell to try and keep up with demand that changes so rapidly.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I suspect it's securing the rights to build towers, and the rights to install fiber to those towers. Actually building the thing shouldn't be much of a big deal. getting a permit to dig up a mile of street, that sounds like a pain.
rb808 10y ago
I switched to tmobile $30 plan a year ago and regularly got 25mbps around Manhattan, now days I get around 10, often 5.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Yeah, their bandwidth decreased noticeably.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    With their massive subscriber growth I'm not surprised, it seems a lot of the network investment they've been pushing has been extending coverage and in-building service with their Band 12 licensing. With them looking at deploying a "5G" network by 2020 I'm not sure if there are plans to add new cells right now, they have plenty of backhaul but the physics of shared RF spectrum is biting them now that they've had so many consecutive quarters of net subscriber adds. Here's hoping they do invest in some more cells for my dense metro bretheren, because I enjoy 60Mbps at least day-to-day here in Boise :/
codazoda 10y ago
"From early 2015 to early 2016 there was a 56% increase in data usage according to Cisco." And there you see the problem with data caps (common among mobile carriers but swiftly coming to cable). We have plenty of bandwidth today and are squeezed for more money in a few years.
- timmaah 10y ago
  We don't have plenty of mobile bandwidth though. 56% increase resulted in 50% degradation of speed. What happens next year to speeds with continued growth in usage?
  - codazoda 10y ago
    Good point that we need to think about. I'm more worried about caps in landlines. A similar problem exists there, however. Here's a good article on it. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/
rosser 10y ago
Living in SF, I haven't really noticed this, which the article bears out. I was actually just commenting in one of our Slack channels at $work that it's still kinda weird to me that the internets are, on average, at least 4x faster (throughput, not latency) on my phone vs my home internet service (bonded DSL). EDIT: Out of curiosity, I just checked again, first on LTE and then on WiFi: LTE: 30ms ping 64mbit/s down 23mbit/s up WiFi: 24ms ping 6mbit/s down 2mbit/s up
- cbhl 10y ago
  There are a few high-rises in SF with gigabit fiber optic to the premises. It's nice, but it makes me sad that "anti-techie" sentiment is so strong that most of the city won't get it.
  - rosser 10y ago
    Srs. My ISP is Sonic, and I'm happy to give them money, because they give me every reason to believe they share values that are important to me, but god, I wish the NIMBY would get out of the way of them rolling out FTTP city-wide.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      I suspect it's the complete lack of actual cable vaults beneath the streets in suburbia that is the issue here. Those things should be /required/ by regulation. Actually there should be three isolated types: Power Clean flows (water in, gas, telecom/data) Outflows . . .
  - JimboOmega 10y ago
    Why the wired Internet is so bad in SF is another question entirely (one I'd like to have the answer to, because I'm so sick of my AT&T copper based DSL, but my hatred for Comcast is very strong due to their billing practices ).
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  Does not surprise me. I switched my internet contract to unlimited LTE here in Austria and it has been great. Would do again. (Building here has fiber though so I might switch if it turns out to be an issue)
samfisher83 10y ago
Yes the more people that use it slower it goes since people have to share the same bandwidth. However given all the datacaps the faster the speed the faster you hit the datacap so I guess you can look at the positive side.
beamatronic 10y ago
Mobile networks in a way are seemingly destined to be victims of their own success. I find that no matter what mobile bandwidth I'm getting, I can always use more. For example, considering adding a dedicated hotspot to my existing plan, just for my car. The better it works, the more I want to use it. And by "it", we are talking about a fixed physical infrastructure, otherwise known as a capital investment.
- zanny 10y ago
  If the US made any sense, this would be a public works infrastructure project rather than private enterprise. The tower density and spectrum that will be needed for effective substitution of traditional wired internet services with wireless towers will be prohibitive for any reasonable company to simply invest their way into, and big teleco has proven historically to love charging more for the same now than competing to make the service better once it starts looking expensive to keep up.
  - greedo 10y ago
    Let's unpack this. If this is done at the Federal level, ala the Interstate Highway system, it would never work. Wireless infrastructure is still incredibly immature compared to road technology. And the idea that the government would be able to spend the amount of money required to keep up to provide the same or better service than the private sector has never been proven, and IMHO unlikely. Look at how NASA has been run the last 30 years, and how it's been spending its money on their current launch system. The problem is that the capital expenses are high in this industry, so the players naturally want to recoup their costs and focus on profits. Eventually technology will shift, demand will rise, and one of the telcos will take the plunge in an attempt to gain marketshare. Their competitors will react, and for a while it'll be golden for the users. Then the cycle will repeat.
    - zanny 10y ago
      You don't even need a wholly public-only solution. Licensing out state-owned towers to third parties, in addition to providing baseline public service, would be adequate to allow third party companies to compete too. You don't need to try to artificially restrict spectrum use, just make intentional obstruction illegal just like blocking a road is. Then if state technology calls too far behind due to budget cuts people move back to private solutions until the state can get its act together again. Of course, the problems with US infrastructure run a lot deeper than that. I imagine in a more democratic country you would see the maintenance and upkeep of such infrastructure much easier to maintain.
roflchoppa 10y ago
22gb per month expected with 4K? Lawl I was doing ~40gb per month when I first got an iPhone 5s on att. Good times.
- thetinguy 10y ago
  Thanks for ruining unlimited data.
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    Nah, i was on AnR from ATT, they paid for it themselves. nice try tho.
  - mountaineer22 10y ago
    I want to downvote this comment.
  - ramenmeal 10y ago
    There is no purpose of marketing unlimited data if it can get "ruined" by people who use lots of data. Anyway, why do you need unlimited data if you don't use a lot of data?
  - flukus 10y ago
    How can you ruin what never existed? What is dead may never die.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    40gb is still low. I've seen people that use terabytes on their phones.
zanny 10y ago
Hey look, another example of why trying to sell the rights to light sucks. We are going to see AT&T / Verizon / etc go the way of Comcast soon. The cost to improve service will be high enough and the overhead of trying to get more spectrum when they hit physical limits annoying enough and their revenues large enough and the demand insane enough they are going to constantly try to buy each other out than actually invest anything until we have one big corrupt mess like Comcast is for physical wire service. It seems like the inevitable outcome of having infrastructure services that should be public utilities instead be provided by private companies competing over who can exploit the state to get more unfair advantage, be it land access rights for wire carriers or FCC bribing for spectrum.
- JimboOmega 10y ago
  Sad, because they're the best hope we have against Comcast - at least wireless providers (I'm stuck with DSL over AT&T copper because I absolutely refuse to deal with Comcast any further, and my phone is faster than my home internet). At least it's relatively easier to set up a cell tower as a new competitor than it is to wire the same number of homes; this is a big factor in why we've seen the explosion of wireless in the developing world (often in places where even basic electric service is unreliable). And hey, the feds DID block T-Mobile and AT&T from merging, so there's hope yet that they won't just roll over to every request.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Soon? They're already at it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile_USA_by_AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-owner-is-said-to-still-hold-out-hope-for-a-t-mobile-deal http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-own...
merb 10y ago
> Verizon has the broadest LTE coverage at 95.3%, followed by T-Mobile with 91.7%. higher than in Germany, great!
morgante 10y ago
Anecdotally, I've been incredibly disappointed in LTE speeds for NYC lately. It's almost a joke how slow LTE is. Browsing the web feels like using ancient DSL. There's definitely a material difference between providers. I'm on Verizon now, but T-Mobile and AT&T were both much better when I had them (and I'll be switching back as soon as I can).
- vdnkh 10y ago
  Last Friday I couldn't even get a page to load on my iPhone with "full bars" on Verizon. Where does all the money go towards? Not fios, that's for sure (Verizon defaulted on a deal with the city to roll out fiber to all households[0]). [0]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/nyc-threatens-to-sue-verizon-over-fios-shortfalls/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/nyc-threatens-to-...
  - morgante 10y ago
    Since joining Verizon I've realized that bars are more or less meaningless. There are many times when I can't even make a phone call with "full bars." Sadly, I've also been very disappointed with FiOS speeds lately.
    - lightedman 10y ago
      Verizon's claims are pure BS. When I did some work for a company called CrunchButton, I figured out (using my fiance's phone) that Verizon had towers that weren't connected to anything. They were just there to provide you with 'full signal' (your phone never connected to these towers) so they could claim coverage in that area. You couldn't make a phone call from that area on the Verizon network. Meanwhile, my T-Mobile phone showed three bars and worked flawlessly. Don't trust Verizon. They're a sham company.
    - ryao 10y ago
      Would you elaborate?
  - jacquesc 10y ago
iagooar 10y ago
I work at a quite large telecom company and one of the most repeated topics is that mobile traffic has been doubling every year for the last years. The trend is going to keep growing even more. The nature of mobile networks is being a shared resource, as opposed to traditional DSL or Fiber which have a generally more dedicated bandwith. This obviously implies quite a challenge for telcos, as expanding the network comes at a massive cost.
josh2600 10y ago
Traditionally the way that carriers deal with bandwidth congestion is to wait until people start screaming (and networks start breaking) before they invest in innovation. There are a bunch of technologies that could ease congestion and deliver significantly better wireless performance but they would require an investment that doesn't make sense for carriers (it's not like carriers can extract more money from you if the network is better...). That is to say, subscriber ARPU does not increase with network investment, so why invest in the network until it becomes a drag on subscriber growth? Source: I was a manager at ATT when the network in San Francisco basically died with the introduction of the iPhone 3G. It stayed that way until ATT added new towers and upgraded the software on the towers for better spectrum utilization.
Osiris 10y ago
I have Sprint LTE in Denver and the latency and bandwidth are horrible. I often get 1mbps with really high latency.
- briankwest 10y ago
  Have they deployed band 41 in the area yet? I see band 26 being saturated more then band 25, but they both are slow at times.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
"Kill the Snapchat"
lightedman 10y ago
"Network speeds are not what they advertise or what you see in the Bay Area" So why are the companies in San Francisco not getting sued for false advertising?
- syntheticcdo 10y ago
  This is a comment directly from the author to his technical audience. Worded awkwardly and combining two thoughts, he is saying, just because your app works well in SF, does not mean it works well everywhere.
bjornsing 10y ago
I've bet pretty big on this development (and its continuation) by building http://www.anyfinetworks.com http://www.anyfinetworks.com. Gonna be very interesting how it plays out! :P
gnicholas 10y ago
This is an interesting read, but the comparisons to other countries/regions omits any mention of population density. It's much easier to roll out public utilities in dense areas than sparsely populated ones, and western Europe and Korea are more densely populated than the US. Not that this excuses the big drop in speeds, but it makes the comparative piece a bit less relevant/accurate.
- 4ad 10y ago
  More population density means smaller cells, more towers, more infrastructure, higher level of wired network throughput surface density required, more money. It might be economically unfeasible to service remote areas, but covering a given area is much harder as population density increases, not less hard. Yet other countries can do while charging the consumer less.
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    I agree that there are different challenges to serving high-density areas, but I don't agree that these challenges are necessarily harder than creating a far-flung network. These articles [1] [2] indicate that for wired high-speed internet, population density is a good thing for cost savings. To the extent that high-speed wired internet is part of the infrastructure needed for high-speed cellular networks, the cost benefit would similarly favor dense populations. Tower density would have to be higher, of course, and interference could be an issue, but I've not seen anything indicating that these challenges outweigh the cost savings from having a dense population. I'd be interested in seeing an analysis! 1: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-cant-the-us-have-south-koreas-blazing-fast-int.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-cant-th... 2: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/
- imtringued 10y ago
  Wireless technology has solved this problem since you no longer have to wire up each individual home. It's probably more difficult in dense populations because you need more towers and spectrum is limited.
pmuk 10y ago
Just did a test on my iPhone 7 showing 4G over EE in the UK... 18 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up
jack_quack 10y ago
Oh yeah! I was visiting NYC from Canada and I kept complaining to my wife that the LTE speeds were so slow in the city. I just couldn't understand it!
- neurotixz 10y ago
  Downtown Montreal here, speed right now: 83 mbit/s down 13 mbit/s up Quite good, almost as fast as my home connection.
renegadesensei 10y ago
Meanwhile here in Tokyo my mobile data connection is faster than the wifi running off of my 1 Gb/s internet connection...
givinguflac 10y ago
I remember getting on VZW LTE reasonably early, with the HTC Thunderbolt (don't even get me started; that device was trash) and I consistently got 60-80Mb down. Now I'm the same location, same carrier, infinitely faster LTE modem, I get maybe 5-10Mb if I'm lucky. Such a shame, could've been transformative.
- cynwoody 10y ago
  I just tested my T-Mobile LTE using Ookla. I'm in suburban Boston. The local time was about 00:30. Results: 69.39 down, 20.70 up, 36 ms ping (to Norwood). The test used about 170 megabytes of my 3-gigabyte monthly quota.
fbreduc 10y ago
gimme a good ol hard line
frandroid 10y ago
> With the onset of functionality like 4K video streaming, this number is set to increase to as much as 22GB/month. Oh god why would anyone want to watch 4K on a cellphone. Go for 60fps instead, you'll get some value out of that on your 5" screen.
- asenna 10y ago
  That's what I thought too. 4K doesn't make any sense on that small a screen. I think streaming VR content is what is going to contribute to a much larger data usage.
rcthompson 10y ago
I went to a wedding in upstate New York last weekend, and I on the drive up, there were some areas where I had no 4G (or LTE, or whatever my phone gets), but anywhere that it was available, it was substantially faster than what I'm used to from the densely-populated areas where I spend most of my time. I assume this was because there were simply fewer people sharing approximately the same bandwidth.
- adammunich 10y ago
  Many people mistake the Gb/s numbers for these modem protocols as Gb/s per subscriber, when in reality it's more so the total throughput of a tower modem shared among subscribers. Outrage of course, ensues.
lgats 10y ago
3 hours ago, I received an email from Verizon titled : "Brian, Verizon LTE Advanced has 50% faster peak speeds."
dekhna 10y ago
It seems that the companies did it right by launching LTE instead of 4G as they could have lost their 4G status
acdha 10y ago
Des the actual report cover whether there are any differences across carriers? I know in the 3G era there used to be fairly significant variations for the companies which installed newer base stations without upgrading their back-haul capacity to match.
mycall 10y ago
So as more people start using LTE, 3G becomes faster?

492 points by wkoszek 10y ago

Excellent timing considering the HN thread [1] about T-Mobile being fined for network management. "There is no doubt that the US will need to set up the infrastructure to keep pace with the rapid changes in usage and content expected in the future. Like any instance of supply and demand, we will continue to see a give and take in this market. As operators catch up to the current demand and LTE becomes faster, users will opt to use it over others – thus creating greater demand, supply scarcity, and decreased performance. At which point the cycle will begin again." TL;DR Expect more network management in the future due to heavy demand of a constrained resource. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12745255

wkoszek 10y ago
Yeah. Saw this other article in the front page of HN and it inspired me to post this one too.
Dylan16807 10y ago
*fined for misleading customers about network management
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Your average user doesn't care, as long as they're not charged extra for exceeding their quota.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    The quotas on wireless ISPs are already very low and people exceed them very regularly. What can be done to actually improve the situation? What choice do consumers have?
    - Pigo 10y ago
      They'll take my grand-fathered-in unlimited plan from my cold, dead hands... Actually one more contract-violating rate increase and I'll probably be forced to give it up. The only way I still justify it is everyone is paying an arm and a leg to Verizonopoly in my area.
    - whamlastxmas 10y ago
      Voting for representatives that actually represent people and not corporations.
      - andrei_says_ 10y ago
        Which means voting for people supporting election financing reform.
        whamlastxmas 10y ago
        I had this thought earlier: how about just electing people who don't give in to corporate lobbying. Keep corporate donations legal, I don't care, just actually look at the disclosure forms of where their money is coming from and don't vote for them if you disagree with conflicts of interest. Or if they have PACs that aren't transparent, don't vote for them. People are unable to make their voting decisions outside of the TV commercials and news articles they read, so I don't have any real hope for this tactic.
    - comex 10y ago
      But consumers do have a choice, at least in the US. T-Mobile offers unlimited data plans, and although they were just fined by the FCC for deprioritizing heavy data users in cases of congestion, that's still a significant improvement over standard data caps. (At least T-Mobile never did what AT&T used to do before they were sued, throttling users who weren't connected to congested towers.) Some web searching shows that Sprint just recently started up a similar offering. Sure, the more favorable terms come at the expense of network quality compared to Verizon or AT&T, but they're not that bad and that's the nature of competition...
whamlastxmas 10y ago
>There is no doubt that the US will need to set up the infrastructure to keep pace with the rapid changes in usage and content expected in the future. I feel like we've been here before. It's almost like it's 1996 again with the Telecommunications Act. Our infrastructure is bullshit and it's making the US economy fall behind its peers. No worries! Instead of actually directly fixing the problem, let's give away all the power to corporations to fix as long as they super-pinky-swear to meet infrastructure goals. Of course we all know how this ends - they didn't meet those goals, service stagnated even more, there was never any recourse, and we've axed the option to directly fix the problem. How convenient for ISP stakeholders in 1996.
1_2__3 10y ago
...due to heavy demand of an artificially constrained resource. If this worked the way free-market idolizers like to pretend there'd be competitors driving prices down and features/capabilities up. But none of that is happening.

franciscop 10y ago

A quick reminder that 4G != LTE. The 4G specification requires a minimum speed [1] so LTE was launched to avoid exactly this minimum. It seems that the companies did it right by launching LTE instead of 4G as they could have lost their 4G status, while now they could drop as low as 3G speeds and still be called LTE (which is ironic on itself). This wasn't commented at all in the article, using 4G and LTE interchangeably which I find troubling. [1] 100Mbit/s for high-speed transit areas and 1GBit/s for low-speed transit areas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_understanding

mhurron 10y ago
> using 4G and LTE interchangeably which I find troubling It follows the colloquial usage though.
- grecy 10y ago
  > It follows the colloquial usage though. ....set by Marketers working for Cell phone companies who are very happy to trick you into thinking you have a faster service than you do. Source: Worked for a cell phone company that was ecstatic to roll out new towers and tout "4G for all". They were LTE towers, with a back haul incapable of 3G speeds.
mherdeg 10y ago
My go-to reference on the situation is https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/essay_3g_and_me https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/essay_3g_and_me. Like Keith says, more important than whether you have 3G, 4G, or LTE is: ""How much spectrum has the carrier licensed in my city, and how much is allocated to this kind of modulation? How many other people am I sharing the local tower with? In other words, how big is my cell, and how many towers has the carrier built or contracted with? How much throughput are my cellmates trying to consume? How much throughput has the carrier built in its back-end network connecting to the tower? You might notice that all of these meat-and-potatoes factors involve the carrier spending money, and they all involve gradual improvement in behind-the-scenes infrastructure that's hard to get customers excited. Persuading you to buy a new cell phone with a sophisticated modem and sign up for a two-year contract is a different story. So they don't sell you something measurable where they could be held accountable; they sell how sweet it feels to be using a sophisticated radio modem protocol to talk to them. … If the carrier sold you "384 kbps Internet access anywhere in the coverage area, outdoors," that would be something you could hold them accountable for. The carrier might even have to put a brake on signing up new customers until it could build new towers or license more spectrum for everybody to share, if it made that guarantee.""

mjevans 10y ago

I think that control of content is one of the major reasons for this. If users were more able to readily (and for zero cost to them) cache content when connected to local networks then we would see less content transferred over 'higher cost' networks. Of course streaming services (I'm thinking more of Twitch than Netflix) for live content production are 'rather difficult to cache' in their prime viewing time.

bsder 10y ago
The thing most difficult to cache is the thing that all the providers most want: advertising. If you removed the advertising from the web, caching gets really easy except for something like Twitch.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

mschuster91 10y ago

What I don't get is: why can't I as an app developer specify what kind of data transfer rate I need and have the phone choose which connection type it needs depending on the currently running software? Like, if I'm doing push notifications or IRC, I'd tell the phone that I only need 2G speeds, and the phone only connects to something faster than 2G if I open the web browser. Right now, my phone books into LTE as soon as it's in coverage mode - and it stays there, eating power like nothing else, instead of dropping into the relatively quiet and strong-signal 2G/3G/HSxPA cells and saving power.

gergles 10y ago
Your phone is actually far more battery-efficient when it's able to only use LTE (i.e., if your carrier supports Voice over LTE). It's having to have both radios on (one for voice and one for data) that is hard on the battery.
- joecool1029 10y ago
  Not exactly. When it's on LTE and doesn't support voLTE, the signaling is used here to search, connect, and handoff to HSPA or GSM (or CDMA). It increases the call setup time, but it isn't actually a major factor in battery life. GSM will win most in battery efficiency due to it being a TDMA based standard that pulses the radio off and on. But LTE has improved a long way since the early days.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    UMTS and HSPA were fine on battery life and they were CDMA technologies. The big difference is the extra work basebands have to do to handle new modulation technologies as well as the extra CPU time it takes to handle more data. More efficient CMOS processes, baseband designs as well as ARM core designs have been the main cause behind power efficiency in LTE-enabled devices.
    - joecool1029 10y ago
      Maybe you remember a different history than I do. WCDMA/HSPA was poorly designed early on to tackle smartphones and had terrible battery life and performance. To summarize pre-2012 HSPA: - Basically, HSPA phones until around 2011 or so stayed in a higher power state much longer than they should have. - People got pissy about having crap battery life. - Manufacturers responded by doing proprietary hacks to send modem into lower power state. - Cell networks essentially got DDOS'd as phones sent nonstop signaling to negotiate different power states. - Phones now not only got poor battery life, but also barely operated on the now congested network.. remember the at&t iphone monopoly days before 2012 in major cities, it was a bad time. 3GPP Rel8 came about to fix the issue for good by moving power state control to the towers. Here's an article explaining the technicals of it: http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2010/10/fast-dormancy-in-release-8.html http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2010/10/fast-dormancy-in-release-8.ht... Easier read: http://www.3glteinfo.com/fast-dormancy-in-3gpp/ http://www.3glteinfo.com/fast-dormancy-in-3gpp/ Would agree though that process size and baseband optimization is helping the LTE situation. Differences are very small and Apple actually quotes better LTE life on the SE than 3G. LTE really came into its own in just the past 2 years.

timmaah 10y ago

I've noticed it big time in the northeast. I live on the road and work via a Verizon connection. Over the last 6 months over 7 or 8 locations I get a full Verizon signal (with a booster) and very low speeds compared to a year ago. And speeds increasing at off peak times (it's fast in the middle of the night) point to overloaded towers. I know people love to hate on cell companies but it must be hell to try and keep up with demand that changes so rapidly.

jfoutz 10y ago
I suspect it's securing the rights to build towers, and the rights to install fiber to those towers. Actually building the thing shouldn't be much of a big deal. getting a permit to dig up a mile of street, that sounds like a pain.

rb808 10y ago

I switched to tmobile $30 plan a year ago and regularly got 25mbps around Manhattan, now days I get around 10, often 5.

shmerl 10y ago
Yeah, their bandwidth decreased noticeably.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  With their massive subscriber growth I'm not surprised, it seems a lot of the network investment they've been pushing has been extending coverage and in-building service with their Band 12 licensing. With them looking at deploying a "5G" network by 2020 I'm not sure if there are plans to add new cells right now, they have plenty of backhaul but the physics of shared RF spectrum is biting them now that they've had so many consecutive quarters of net subscriber adds. Here's hoping they do invest in some more cells for my dense metro bretheren, because I enjoy 60Mbps at least day-to-day here in Boise :/

codazoda 10y ago

"From early 2015 to early 2016 there was a 56% increase in data usage according to Cisco." And there you see the problem with data caps (common among mobile carriers but swiftly coming to cable). We have plenty of bandwidth today and are squeezed for more money in a few years.

timmaah 10y ago
We don't have plenty of mobile bandwidth though. 56% increase resulted in 50% degradation of speed. What happens next year to speeds with continued growth in usage?
- codazoda 10y ago
  Good point that we need to think about. I'm more worried about caps in landlines. A similar problem exists there, however. Here's a good article on it. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

rosser 10y ago

Living in SF, I haven't really noticed this, which the article bears out. I was actually just commenting in one of our Slack channels at $work that it's still kinda weird to me that the internets are, on average, at least 4x faster (throughput, not latency) on my phone vs my home internet service (bonded DSL). EDIT: Out of curiosity, I just checked again, first on LTE and then on WiFi: LTE: 30ms ping 64mbit/s down 23mbit/s up WiFi: 24ms ping 6mbit/s down 2mbit/s up

cbhl 10y ago
There are a few high-rises in SF with gigabit fiber optic to the premises. It's nice, but it makes me sad that "anti-techie" sentiment is so strong that most of the city won't get it.
- rosser 10y ago
  Srs. My ISP is Sonic, and I'm happy to give them money, because they give me every reason to believe they share values that are important to me, but god, I wish the NIMBY would get out of the way of them rolling out FTTP city-wide.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    I suspect it's the complete lack of actual cable vaults beneath the streets in suburbia that is the issue here. Those things should be /required/ by regulation. Actually there should be three isolated types: Power Clean flows (water in, gas, telecom/data) Outflows . . .
- JimboOmega 10y ago
  Why the wired Internet is so bad in SF is another question entirely (one I'd like to have the answer to, because I'm so sick of my AT&T copper based DSL, but my hatred for Comcast is very strong due to their billing practices ).
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Does not surprise me. I switched my internet contract to unlimited LTE here in Austria and it has been great. Would do again. (Building here has fiber though so I might switch if it turns out to be an issue)

samfisher83 10y ago

Yes the more people that use it slower it goes since people have to share the same bandwidth. However given all the datacaps the faster the speed the faster you hit the datacap so I guess you can look at the positive side.

beamatronic 10y ago

Mobile networks in a way are seemingly destined to be victims of their own success. I find that no matter what mobile bandwidth I'm getting, I can always use more. For example, considering adding a dedicated hotspot to my existing plan, just for my car. The better it works, the more I want to use it. And by "it", we are talking about a fixed physical infrastructure, otherwise known as a capital investment.

zanny 10y ago
If the US made any sense, this would be a public works infrastructure project rather than private enterprise. The tower density and spectrum that will be needed for effective substitution of traditional wired internet services with wireless towers will be prohibitive for any reasonable company to simply invest their way into, and big teleco has proven historically to love charging more for the same now than competing to make the service better once it starts looking expensive to keep up.
- greedo 10y ago
  Let's unpack this. If this is done at the Federal level, ala the Interstate Highway system, it would never work. Wireless infrastructure is still incredibly immature compared to road technology. And the idea that the government would be able to spend the amount of money required to keep up to provide the same or better service than the private sector has never been proven, and IMHO unlikely. Look at how NASA has been run the last 30 years, and how it's been spending its money on their current launch system. The problem is that the capital expenses are high in this industry, so the players naturally want to recoup their costs and focus on profits. Eventually technology will shift, demand will rise, and one of the telcos will take the plunge in an attempt to gain marketshare. Their competitors will react, and for a while it'll be golden for the users. Then the cycle will repeat.
  - zanny 10y ago
    You don't even need a wholly public-only solution. Licensing out state-owned towers to third parties, in addition to providing baseline public service, would be adequate to allow third party companies to compete too. You don't need to try to artificially restrict spectrum use, just make intentional obstruction illegal just like blocking a road is. Then if state technology calls too far behind due to budget cuts people move back to private solutions until the state can get its act together again. Of course, the problems with US infrastructure run a lot deeper than that. I imagine in a more democratic country you would see the maintenance and upkeep of such infrastructure much easier to maintain.

roflchoppa 10y ago

22gb per month expected with 4K? Lawl I was doing ~40gb per month when I first got an iPhone 5s on att. Good times.

thetinguy 10y ago
Thanks for ruining unlimited data.
- roflchoppa 10y ago
  Nah, i was on AnR from ATT, they paid for it themselves. nice try tho.
- mountaineer22 10y ago
  I want to downvote this comment.
- ramenmeal 10y ago
  There is no purpose of marketing unlimited data if it can get "ruined" by people who use lots of data. Anyway, why do you need unlimited data if you don't use a lot of data?
- flukus 10y ago
  How can you ruin what never existed? What is dead may never die.
- imtringued 10y ago
  40gb is still low. I've seen people that use terabytes on their phones.

zanny 10y ago

Hey look, another example of why trying to sell the rights to light sucks. We are going to see AT&T / Verizon / etc go the way of Comcast soon. The cost to improve service will be high enough and the overhead of trying to get more spectrum when they hit physical limits annoying enough and their revenues large enough and the demand insane enough they are going to constantly try to buy each other out than actually invest anything until we have one big corrupt mess like Comcast is for physical wire service. It seems like the inevitable outcome of having infrastructure services that should be public utilities instead be provided by private companies competing over who can exploit the state to get more unfair advantage, be it land access rights for wire carriers or FCC bribing for spectrum.

JimboOmega 10y ago
Sad, because they're the best hope we have against Comcast - at least wireless providers (I'm stuck with DSL over AT&T copper because I absolutely refuse to deal with Comcast any further, and my phone is faster than my home internet). At least it's relatively easier to set up a cell tower as a new competitor than it is to wire the same number of homes; this is a big factor in why we've seen the explosion of wireless in the developing world (often in places where even basic electric service is unreliable). And hey, the feds DID block T-Mobile and AT&T from merging, so there's hope yet that they won't just roll over to every request.
kalleboo 10y ago
Soon? They're already at it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile_USA_by_AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-owner-is-said-to-still-hold-out-hope-for-a-t-mobile-deal http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-own...

merb 10y ago

> Verizon has the broadest LTE coverage at 95.3%, followed by T-Mobile with 91.7%. higher than in Germany, great!

morgante 10y ago

Anecdotally, I've been incredibly disappointed in LTE speeds for NYC lately. It's almost a joke how slow LTE is. Browsing the web feels like using ancient DSL. There's definitely a material difference between providers. I'm on Verizon now, but T-Mobile and AT&T were both much better when I had them (and I'll be switching back as soon as I can).

vdnkh 10y ago
Last Friday I couldn't even get a page to load on my iPhone with "full bars" on Verizon. Where does all the money go towards? Not fios, that's for sure (Verizon defaulted on a deal with the city to roll out fiber to all households[0]). [0]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/nyc-threatens-to-sue-verizon-over-fios-shortfalls/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/nyc-threatens-to-...
- morgante 10y ago
  Since joining Verizon I've realized that bars are more or less meaningless. There are many times when I can't even make a phone call with "full bars." Sadly, I've also been very disappointed with FiOS speeds lately.
  - lightedman 10y ago
    Verizon's claims are pure BS. When I did some work for a company called CrunchButton, I figured out (using my fiance's phone) that Verizon had towers that weren't connected to anything. They were just there to provide you with 'full signal' (your phone never connected to these towers) so they could claim coverage in that area. You couldn't make a phone call from that area on the Verizon network. Meanwhile, my T-Mobile phone showed three bars and worked flawlessly. Don't trust Verizon. They're a sham company.
  - ryao 10y ago
    Would you elaborate?
- jacquesc 10y ago

iagooar 10y ago

I work at a quite large telecom company and one of the most repeated topics is that mobile traffic has been doubling every year for the last years. The trend is going to keep growing even more. The nature of mobile networks is being a shared resource, as opposed to traditional DSL or Fiber which have a generally more dedicated bandwith. This obviously implies quite a challenge for telcos, as expanding the network comes at a massive cost.

josh2600 10y ago

Traditionally the way that carriers deal with bandwidth congestion is to wait until people start screaming (and networks start breaking) before they invest in innovation. There are a bunch of technologies that could ease congestion and deliver significantly better wireless performance but they would require an investment that doesn't make sense for carriers (it's not like carriers can extract more money from you if the network is better...). That is to say, subscriber ARPU does not increase with network investment, so why invest in the network until it becomes a drag on subscriber growth? Source: I was a manager at ATT when the network in San Francisco basically died with the introduction of the iPhone 3G. It stayed that way until ATT added new towers and upgraded the software on the towers for better spectrum utilization.

Osiris 10y ago

I have Sprint LTE in Denver and the latency and bandwidth are horrible. I often get 1mbps with really high latency.

briankwest 10y ago
Have they deployed band 41 in the area yet? I see band 26 being saturated more then band 25, but they both are slow at times.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

"Kill the Snapchat"

lightedman 10y ago

"Network speeds are not what they advertise or what you see in the Bay Area" So why are the companies in San Francisco not getting sued for false advertising?

syntheticcdo 10y ago
This is a comment directly from the author to his technical audience. Worded awkwardly and combining two thoughts, he is saying, just because your app works well in SF, does not mean it works well everywhere.

bjornsing 10y ago

I've bet pretty big on this development (and its continuation) by building http://www.anyfinetworks.com http://www.anyfinetworks.com. Gonna be very interesting how it plays out! :P

gnicholas 10y ago

This is an interesting read, but the comparisons to other countries/regions omits any mention of population density. It's much easier to roll out public utilities in dense areas than sparsely populated ones, and western Europe and Korea are more densely populated than the US. Not that this excuses the big drop in speeds, but it makes the comparative piece a bit less relevant/accurate.

4ad 10y ago
More population density means smaller cells, more towers, more infrastructure, higher level of wired network throughput surface density required, more money. It might be economically unfeasible to service remote areas, but covering a given area is much harder as population density increases, not less hard. Yet other countries can do while charging the consumer less.
- gnicholas 10y ago
  I agree that there are different challenges to serving high-density areas, but I don't agree that these challenges are necessarily harder than creating a far-flung network. These articles [1] [2] indicate that for wired high-speed internet, population density is a good thing for cost savings. To the extent that high-speed wired internet is part of the infrastructure needed for high-speed cellular networks, the cost benefit would similarly favor dense populations. Tower density would have to be higher, of course, and interference could be an issue, but I've not seen anything indicating that these challenges outweigh the cost savings from having a dense population. I'd be interested in seeing an analysis! 1: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-cant-the-us-have-south-koreas-blazing-fast-int.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-cant-th... 2: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/
imtringued 10y ago
Wireless technology has solved this problem since you no longer have to wire up each individual home. It's probably more difficult in dense populations because you need more towers and spectrum is limited.

pmuk 10y ago

Just did a test on my iPhone 7 showing 4G over EE in the UK... 18 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up

jack_quack 10y ago

Oh yeah! I was visiting NYC from Canada and I kept complaining to my wife that the LTE speeds were so slow in the city. I just couldn't understand it!

neurotixz 10y ago
Downtown Montreal here, speed right now: 83 mbit/s down 13 mbit/s up Quite good, almost as fast as my home connection.

renegadesensei 10y ago

Meanwhile here in Tokyo my mobile data connection is faster than the wifi running off of my 1 Gb/s internet connection...

givinguflac 10y ago

I remember getting on VZW LTE reasonably early, with the HTC Thunderbolt (don't even get me started; that device was trash) and I consistently got 60-80Mb down. Now I'm the same location, same carrier, infinitely faster LTE modem, I get maybe 5-10Mb if I'm lucky. Such a shame, could've been transformative.

cynwoody 10y ago
I just tested my T-Mobile LTE using Ookla. I'm in suburban Boston. The local time was about 00:30. Results: 69.39 down, 20.70 up, 36 ms ping (to Norwood). The test used about 170 megabytes of my 3-gigabyte monthly quota.

fbreduc 10y ago

gimme a good ol hard line

frandroid 10y ago

> With the onset of functionality like 4K video streaming, this number is set to increase to as much as 22GB/month. Oh god why would anyone want to watch 4K on a cellphone. Go for 60fps instead, you'll get some value out of that on your 5" screen.

asenna 10y ago
That's what I thought too. 4K doesn't make any sense on that small a screen. I think streaming VR content is what is going to contribute to a much larger data usage.

rcthompson 10y ago

I went to a wedding in upstate New York last weekend, and I on the drive up, there were some areas where I had no 4G (or LTE, or whatever my phone gets), but anywhere that it was available, it was substantially faster than what I'm used to from the densely-populated areas where I spend most of my time. I assume this was because there were simply fewer people sharing approximately the same bandwidth.

adammunich 10y ago
Many people mistake the Gb/s numbers for these modem protocols as Gb/s per subscriber, when in reality it's more so the total throughput of a tower modem shared among subscribers. Outrage of course, ensues.

lgats 10y ago

3 hours ago, I received an email from Verizon titled : "Brian, Verizon LTE Advanced has 50% faster peak speeds."

dekhna 10y ago

It seems that the companies did it right by launching LTE instead of 4G as they could have lost their 4G status

acdha 10y ago

Des the actual report cover whether there are any differences across carriers? I know in the 3G era there used to be fairly significant variations for the companies which installed newer base stations without upgrading their back-haul capacity to match.

mycall 10y ago

So as more people start using LTE, 3G becomes faster?