
Apple's iPhones Trail Samsung, Google Devices in Internet Speeds - maltalex
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-23/apple-s-iphones-trail-samsung-google-devices-in-internet-speeds
======
IBM
This story is part of the ongoing Qualcomm PR effort to get people to care
about what modem is in their phones [1]. Of course no one actually makes a
purchasing decision based on what modem is in their smartphone.

[1] [https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2018/07/23/over-million-
us...](https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2018/07/23/over-million-user-
initiated-tests-confirm-superior-cellular-performance-android)

~~~
tooltalk
Not sure why so many are pooh pooh'ng this. I consider the quality of display
and the speed of modem two most important aspects of modern smartphones. Not
everyone lives next to cell towers or in high density areas like NYC. I
actually do live in NYC, but in less desirable area where avg download speed
is ~2mps (Oneplus 5T on TMobile), but it was much slower and frustrating on my
older phone (Note 4 on AT&T).

~~~
orev
The speed you get is far more dependent on the signal strength, not the speed
of the modem. That only comes into play when you have a perfect signal, so
realistically (as a perfect signal is rare), modem speed plays almost no part
in speed limitations.

~~~
joecool1029
It does come into play in weak signal situations. Consider support for more
spatial streams (4x4 mimo) helps with reception in cell edge areas and when
noise levels are high or multipath interference is a factor. Also every
modem/antenna pairing has limits programmed in where they'll drop a cell or
switch to a different layer (band) with less bandwidth.

No iphone uses 4x4 mimo. Maybe for battery, or maybe Jony couldn't make it
pleasing looking enough in the X, but its lack is very much is a factor
affecting quality of service including speed in non-ideal environments.

~~~
innagadadavida
Are there any reliable objective numbers and comparisons for this? While mimo
is a great technology, it is trivial to “hold your iPhone right way” and get
the same benefits, I feel mimo has become a marketing ploy for companies to
push their latest without any perceptible impact to users.

~~~
joecool1029
Here’s some testing on the S7 with T-Mobile using 4x4:
[http://cellularinsights.com/samsung-galaxy-s7-the-
first-4x4-...](http://cellularinsights.com/samsung-galaxy-s7-the-
first-4x4-mimo-smartphone/)

There’s a perceptable impact to users with mimi and it specifically takes
advantage of multipath. This is not a case of marketing fluff.

However, 256QAM is something you’ll probably only see in ideal situations as
it requires very good signal, that’s the one that edged out gigabit speeds in
the lab.

------
LyndsySimon
At some point, does it really matter?

Maybe I'm still in the honeymoon phase with my iPhone X, but I've had it for a
few months now. The last iPhone I owned was a 4S, and I've been on Android
ever since. I was very happy with Samsung's Galaxy line from the S4 Active to
the S7 Edge, but the Edge simultaneously slowed to a crawl and lost at least
half its battery life after 18 months. It was to the point that I had to
charge it every time I was sitting down.

The iPhone X has been great. The interface is fast and gets out of the way,
and Siri is actually starting to become useful for more than a parlor trick.

FWIW, I'm writing this from a bluffline overlooking a lake. My MBP is tethered
to my iPhone, and I'm getting a consistent 50Mbps. I don't know that
additional download speed would be useful to me at the moment.

~~~
jryan49
Pretty sure if I paid $1000 for a phone I would want it to be the fastest.

~~~
oarsinsync
In which metric? Don't think you get the fastest in all metrics for that low a
sum. Especially with all the other top-in-class features that also matter to
people.

~~~
jryan49
Yeah you're right. It's hard to put a value on these things especially when
people value things in different ways. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure
Apple makes quite the margin on the iphone x.

------
oneplane
It's a rather insignificant fact. Sure, if those numbers meant some real-world
thing, then it would be good to know, but in this case, it's going to be hard
to find a normal user that actually cares.

On top of that, location, networking and movement matter, so you could easily
simply uncover living habits of users instead of the actual device's speeds.
If (and this is unlikely, but bear with) all iPhone users would live outside
of extremely well covered areas then they would get different LTE speeds.
Doesn't say much about the phone, chipset or provider, just about location.

While the article touts Ookla as a good idea because it's real-world speeds,
they should also have mentioned that it has no real-world meaning either, as
well as having real-world numbers not meaning much in comparison between
providers, phones, and locations.

At the same time, if the manufacturers of phones use different modems and one
is slightly faster than the other, good on them, but who cares?

------
wufufufu
Since this is obviously a fanboy war post: I prefer Apple because I feel like
their products are more user focused. Android and Google's mobile environment
feel like a platform on which they can collect data and sell you ads (not that
Apple doesn't collect data, but it isn't their primary business model). It
also seems like Google will write new apps whenever they don't want to deal
with technical debt of the older ones, or they want to use whatever fancy new
platform level service they have that lets you sync 50,000 nodes cross
datacenter instantly using autonomous submarines or whatever.

~~~
King-Aaron
I just long for the day when fan-boys in both camps can admit that all current
phones actually suck.

~~~
wilsonnb2
And I long for the day when fan-boys in both camps can admit that all current
phones are actually quite good. If smartphone development stopped here and we
never got a new smartphone, I don't think it would matter much overall.

It probably could have stopped a few years ago, actually. Perhaps in the
iPhone 6/Galaxy S6 generation.

~~~
King-Aaron
I tend to agree with you on both counts.

------
mjm1138
So Android manufacturers, led by Samsung, have decided to harp on modem speed
because they know they are years behind Apple on processor speed with little
they can do about it, and the tech press has decided to carry their water for
them. In my lifetime I have never heard anyone complain about, or even
discuss, download speeds on their phone.

What's next? "The new Galaxy S12 can reach ignition temperature within 5
seconds of power on. Beat that, Apple!"

~~~
bena
It's that and "customization" that gets harped on the most.

However, the biggest "customizations" I've see were changing the font to a
nigh unreadable one and to install apps they didn't pay for.

~~~
mulletbum
This might go under your "didn't pay for," but it does annoy me that apple
doesn't allow emulators. I bought some SNES games, the console went under, I
would still like to play them on my iPhone. I know it probably is a gray area
for most people, but none the less, Apple could let it be done, but they
don't.

~~~
bena
They probably want to avoid the issue all together.

I used to hang around the Dreamcast homebrew scene and the stance on emulators
were that they were mostly a proof of concept/educational thing so you could
talk about the emulators, how well they performed, bugs, etc, but you couldn't
talk about where to get ROMs or distribute emulators with ROMs on the site.

I don't know how that'd work with iOS apps. In order to keep the emulator app
separate from the ROM, you'd need to be able to download the ROM to some sort
of general storage. Then the app would need to be able to access that storage.
I guess you could do it off of dropbox. Point the emulator to some URL where
the ROM is stored. Downloads the ROM on demand, etc.

The major point is that the app can't really have somewhere official that says
"ROMs be here".

~~~
mulletbum
Correct, but emulation apps would thrive without that. It isn't like people
who make emulators are trying to build them for mass consumption.

------
ksec
1\. All the phone that had the Qualcomm 845 ( X20 Modem ), as tested in those
data, were available later then the iPhone X / 8 / 8 launch. So a 6 months old
phone had better spec then a 12 months old phone, is that suppose to be news?

2\. Your Network speed is fundamentally determined by your Carriers quality,
capacity, etc, much more so then your phone.

3\. Latency, Latency, Latency! I don't care if I get 20Mbps or 200Mbps speed.
I do care if I get 20ms or 2ms latency. Of course that is for those of us who
got decent network, I read in many parts of US you get get sub 10Mbps speed. (
How is that even possible? if you ask most developed Western Europe or East
Asia countries citizen they would have decent network by now )

4\. We actually need to push the bottom half of the market to support better
Modem spec. The more phones support Massive MIMO, LAA or features in later of
of 3GPP Rel spec, the faster the overall network is. Which is something I wish
Apple had done better.

And Finally, any mid range to high end Smartphone, can consume 10GB + of Data
in their theoretical top speed in a matter of few minutes, and that is likely
over their data cap / allowance, would a user care more about their Data speed
or Data Cap?

~~~
doctorsher
Great points. You hit the nail on the head. Once you get 'enough' throughput,
getting more doesn't really improve one's mobile experience. Latency is king.

CPU / power usage is another big one. It's hard to justify a gain in
throughput if it (i) reduces the application's CPU time, making it render the
received data more slowly; or (ii) causes the phone battery to die faster
because the network threads are constantly doing heavy lifting.

While I appreciate the size of the Ookla dataset, they need to be more
thorough with their metrics. Phone performance is a multi-faceted problem, and
throughput alone does not reflect the whole reality. Side note: dslreports has
added bufferbloat testing a while ago, I can't believe Ookla still tests
latency in isolation.

------
0x0
Seems disingenious to only talk about bandwidth (mbps) and not latency (ping
in ms) when discussing "faster internet". I believe it is the latency that is
the biggest cause for sluggishness when browsing or watching videos over 4G,
not the raw throughput (anything over 10mbps should be more than enough even
for HD video)

~~~
j45
Definitely need bandwidth and latency, not just one of them.

Add into it being forced to use Google's DNS servers on android and there's
probably some performance being lost there. It would be nice to be able to set
custom DNS servers on all mobile platforms without having to use a VPN.

~~~
detaro
> _Add into it being forced to use Google 's DNS servers on android_

Source? My phone runs a current Android (and not some custom ROM, but
something standard from it's manufacturer) and doesn't appear to use Google
DNS, at least not for normal functions.

~~~
j45
After disabling WiFi, I invite you to try and change your DNS servers on your
data connection.

The default DNS on mobile data on Android devices is 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=android+change+DNS+on+data+p...](https://www.google.com/search?q=android+change+DNS+on+data+plan)

"DNS changer" apps often spin up a local VPN to tunnel the traffic through.
Folks usually end up rooting their devices to ultimately make this change, or
using a VPN.

As well, I believe Chrome can tend to use Google's DNS servers directly in
some cases.

~~~
detaro
My phone uses my providers DNS servers I'm fairly certain. I can't change
them, that's true and regrettable.

------
ballenf
The article is based on measurement of data speeds but makes bold claims like:

> Faster internet data means that users can load websites and start watching
> movies more quickly, make crisper video calls and get higher-quality video.

But that's not what their data measured -- it measured bandwidth not page or
video loads. Not to mention it goes against the experience everyone's had of a
device getting slower with most OS updates that are optimized for a newer
device. The bandwidth didn't go down with OS upgrade, so a measurement thereof
is pretty meaningless. All else being equal that statement is true, but by
definition (comparing disparate devices and manufacturers) everything else is
different in this data set.

They do qualify it a few paragraphs later:

> To be sure, it can be difficult for users to tell the differences between
> how fast pages load on a phone.

I thought that's what you were claiming to be noticeably faster here?

Only to water down the qualification with:

> But it’s easier to sense the quality of video, how long it takes to pull up
> a song and how long it takes to send an email.

Yes this statement is true in the barest sense, but in the context of the
article it's very misleading since none of the data even attempted to measure
these things.

And sending an email? Who regularly sends huge files that reside on the phone?
And what phone doesn't do that in the background anyway?

Then there's this sentence that gets an award for obtuse phrasing of the week:

> Apple’s main processors that control the speed of launching apps, swiping
> through PDFs and loading games are often recognized as some of the fastest
> in the industry.

In an article about measuring speeds differences down to two or three decimals
points, it's incongruous to talk about "often recognized as" versus just
looking at any of the thousands of benchmarks (also from "real world" users
that are out there). And even weirder that the metrics above of page loads and
video loads are seemingly unaffected by processor speed.

Bloomberg tech reporting is very clickbaity of late. Or it's a conspiracy to
encourage bigger ad-buys from Apple and for them to retreat from ad blocking
and tracking protections. Probably not that, but it's more exciting to imagine
than the alternative of simple incompetence.

------
mh8h
I wonder how that translates into day-to-day experience. I can download stuff
at that speed for like 30 seconds before I hit my monthly data cap.

------
r00fus
Does it seem weird that LTE speeds have dropped significantly over the past
several years and I was posting speeds 2x this with an iPhone 5 in 2013?

I remember getting 10MB/s in 2014 as I watched my Audible download complete
while moving in a car.

At what point does this become another discrimination point for the carriers
to push their favored (i.e. co-branded) marks?

~~~
ksec
That is what happen when many more users are now on LTE, vs your iPhone 5 era
when their LTE network had fewer users and many were still on 3G.

------
joecool1029
So are we putting Qualcomm ads on HN now?

~~~
mrmondo
Yeah I’m seeing Qualcomm ad spam / competitor FUS pop up everywhere, google,
RSS feeds off a few blogs I follow, twitter and any android fan / toolchain
site.

------
reaperducer
So... the iPhones that Apple released eight and nine months ago are slower
than the Samsung phone that came out four months ago.

Shocking!

------
detaro
That seems pretty irrelevant as such standalone numbers. The "average" speeds
are more than fast enough for useful services, don't delay video preload or
pages unnecessarily, ... The interesting aspects aren't captured in such
averages:

how do they handle bad connectivity?

latency?

CPU + GPU + OS + apps turning the incoming data into user interaction.

------
bunderbunder
Is it even worth living a life where it takes more than 10 minutes to stuff
your phone full of ISOs for every major version of Ubuntu that has ever been
released?

------
scarface74
_Faster internet data means that users can load websites and start watching
movies more quickly, make crisper video calls and get higher-quality video._

This is why you don't go to mainstream media for tech news. 4K video streams
at the maximum of 7Mbps on Netflix. "Faster internet speeds" won't help with
any streaming video once you get past that speed.

------
00deadbeef
I'm struggling to see how these speeds are a direct consequence of certain
phones being slower than others. My iPhone 6 happily consumes data at a rate
of 100Mbps over 4G according to the Speedtest app. This phone must surely have
an inferior modem and antennas compared to the much more modern devices
mentioned in this article, yet on average they apparently perform much worse.

Is the device itself really the only variable that could account for the
difference?

For example, I only get these speeds on my network, EE, because I pay for a
"Max" plan which allows me to download data at the fastest speed possible.
However, they sell cheaper plans with capped data rates. Perhaps in this
scenario, iPhone users are choosing worse (cheaper) plans so they can afford
an expensive phone?

------
oceanghost
Seeing as my iPhone X can kill my entire month's data plan in 10 minutes. I'm
not sure if I care.

------
JustSomeNobody
When you're browser is making 500 requests to load a bloated web page, overall
download speed doesn't matter. You know what does? Single core performance for
processing all that javascript.

------
yalogin
I am sure this is not something you can notice but it doesn’t matter. Samsung
is going to do an ad push using it.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
[https://youtu.be/7trMPJNBV20](https://youtu.be/7trMPJNBV20) They do.

------
thermodynthrway
Probably a good time to mention that apples processors have such better
single-core performance that real world internet speeds are usually much
faster.

For example, my buddy has fiber and my Android CPU maxes out at 400mpbs. He
gets close to 600 on speedtest on an old iPhone 5

