
LTE Has Slowed by 50% in the US This Year - wkoszek
http://twinprime.com/lte-has-slowed-by-50-in-the-us/
======
franciscop
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)

~~~
mherdeg
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.""

~~~
Spooky23
I don't buy it. My carrier (AT&T) is almost certainly rate-limiting bandwidth
to phones in my area, doing deeper inspection on their transparent proxies, or
both.

In 2014, as measured by the Ookla app on an iPhone 6, I was routinely 50/17
and 60/20 speedtest to various servers in the region during business hours at
home and work. I know this because I took a screenshot in disbelief.

Today, service varies from 1.5/1 to 10/3 during the day, and 10-15/3 at 5AM. I
don't buy that usage has increased that much.

~~~
joecool1029
Which market?

In the case of the NYC market, AT&T had the worst spectrum planning of any
major carrier. They are suffering because they chose to rely on low-band
spectrum rather than densifying their network, and are now trying to band-aid
the solution by using carrier aggregation of oddball downlink bands. It
doesn't change the core problem of having too many people on each sector.

The reason they have to stake 2G dead this early is because they are spectrum
starved and already only running it in HSPA guard bands. They need every
resource they can get since they haven't been spending money at throwing
towers in every possible place in the city for years. They've been using it to
buy a satellite company, a Mexican carrier, and WCS spectrum that's worthless
without densification. Priorities.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> In the case of the NYC market, AT&T had the worst spectrum planning of any
major carrier.

They've been having a hard time since the late 1990's when they introduced the
"one rate" plans and basically oversold their coverage area in NYC.

I distinctly remembering long articles talking about how the networks were so
saturated, dealers were still activating phones on their network knowing the
customers wouldn't get a signal and would have zero reception in NYC, even
after being told by several courts to stop signing up customers.

Here is the text of the class action lawsuit that made it all the way the NYC
Supreme Court:
[http://www.whafh.com/modules/case/docs/2556_cid_3_AT&T%20Cel...](http://www.whafh.com/modules/case/docs/2556_cid_3_AT&T%20Cellular.PDF)

EDIT: some of the articles I alluded to are listed in the class action
starting on page 9.

~~~
asheldon
"all the way the NYC Supreme Court"

In New York, the "Supreme Court" is the trial-level court. Above that is the
"Supreme Court, Appellate Division" and above that is the "Court of Appeals".

------
josh2600
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.

------
rosser
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

~~~
pixl97
DSL sucks. I'm sure our local ATT has lost the vast majority of it's DSL users
in the past few years because of rollout problems. Their fast connection is
around 20mbit/s download and around 2mbit/s up. Our cable company is offering
50mbit/s down 5mbit/s up for the same price. The cable company is also
offering 100mbit, 200mbit, 500mbit, and 1gbit connections too. On top of that
they offer phone service at half the price.

I think ATT is trying to go out of business here.

~~~
StillBored
ATT also has data caps (now 1TB and $10 per 150GB), compared with the cable
companies (in my area) and google which don't. That doesn't seem to stop about
1/2 of my neighbors from using them though (you can usually tell those people
because they leave the default ATT SSIDs on their wifi APs).

Once a year or so, it seems they hire some kids to come through the
neighborhood selling service door to door. Every time I ask them, do you still
have caps? Usually they stare at me blankly, but I then politely tell them I'm
not even going to consider their service as long as I'm going to have to worry
about a internet bill that could be larger in a single month than what I pay
all year for my cable subscription (which literally got 10x better within a
couple months of google announcing they were going to target my city).

~~~
Osiris
Comcast just implemented 1TB bandwidth caps in most of the U.S., including
where I am, starting on Nov 1.

------
beamatronic
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
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.

~~~
rayiner
> If the US made any sense, this would be a public works infrastructure
> project rather than private enterprise.

No thank you. My Verizon plan is expensive, but it works pretty damn well,
unlike most of the public services here. My wife and I took Amtrak every day
between Wilmington-Baltimore and Baltimore-DC for about two years. It was
regularly late (often very late). Trains broke down in-between Wilmington and
Baltimore regularly, and my wife would be stuck in the train for hours waiting
for a replacement engine to arrive. Many of the tunnels along the route are
decades past their design life.

Before that, I lived in Chicago, where ancient lead water pipes poison kids.
Before that I lived in Atlanta, where ancient sewer systems dump untreated
sewage into the river whenever it rains. I also lived in Wilmington, DE, where
bus drivers would just randomly decide to end their route 15-30 minutes early.
Now I live in D.C., and even though I'm within 0.3 miles of a metro station
both at work and at home, I take Uber because Metro trains keep breaking down
and/or catching on fire.

I'm not a libertarian nutjob, but I don't want the government running my cell
service. Our roads are awful (I just came back from Munich), our transit is
awful, etc. There are a tiny handful of competent public infrastructure
organizations in the country (e.g. New York's water system, Metro North), but
most are a disaster. Verizon may be evil, but unlike say WMATA it doesn't have
to regularly shut down major sections of its network because it spent decades
neglecting its infrastructure.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Amtrak does not work not because it's a public service. Many railways in
Europe are public and the work great.

~~~
rayiner
Many public services in Europe work great. But I'm talking about the US.

------
toomuchtodo
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)

~~~
Dylan16807
*fined for misleading customers about network management

~~~
toomuchtodo
Your average user doesn't care, as long as they're not charged extra for
exceeding their quota.

~~~
seanp2k2
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?

~~~
whamlastxmas
Voting for representatives that actually represent people and not
corporations.

~~~
andrei_says_
Which means voting for people supporting election financing reform.

~~~
whamlastxmas
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.

------
mjevans
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
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.

------
morgante
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
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-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/nyc-threatens-to-sue-
verizon-over-fios-shortfalls/)

~~~
morgante
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
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.

------
iagooar
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.

------
frandroid
> 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
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.

------
timmaah
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
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.

------
zanny
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.

~~~
kalleboo
Soon? They're already at it

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-
Mobile...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-
Mobile_USA_by_AT%26T)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-
own...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/sprint-owner-is-
said-to-still-hold-out-hope-for-a-t-mobile-deal)

------
codazoda
"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
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
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/)

------
mschuster91
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
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
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
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
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.ht...](http://blog.3g4g.co.uk/2010/10/fast-dormancy-in-
release-8.html) 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.

------
givinguflac
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
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.

------
rcthompson
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
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.

------
gnicholas
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
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
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-
th...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-cant-the-us-have-
south-koreas-blazing-fast-int.aspx)

2:
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/](http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/)

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

------
rb808
I switched to tmobile $30 plan a year ago and regularly got 25mbps around
Manhattan, now days I get around 10, often 5.

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, their bandwidth decreased noticeably.

~~~
snuxoll
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 :/

------
roflchoppa
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
Thanks for ruining unlimited data.

~~~
ramenmeal
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?

------
acdha
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.

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

------
bjornsing
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

------
samfisher83
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.

------
jack_quack
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
Downtown Montreal here, speed right now: 83 mbit/s down 13 mbit/s up

Quite good, almost as fast as my home connection.

------
lightedman
"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
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.

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

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

~~~
briankwest
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.

------
merb
> Verizon has the broadest LTE coverage at 95.3%, followed by T-Mobile with
> 91.7%.

higher than in Germany, great!

------
CodeSheikh
"Kill the Snapchat"

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

------
fbreduc
gimme a good ol hard line

