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Users Say Sprint Epic4G 3G Upload Speeds Limited To 150kbps
Miamicanes writes "Nearly everyone who owns a Sprint Samsung Epic 4G and has benchmarked its 3G performance has discovered that its 3G upload speeds are apparently limited to 150kbps. So far, Sprint has not officially acknowledged it as a problem, nor has it indicated whether this might be a firmware bug, a PRL issue, tower-related, or the result of a deliberate policy to cap 3G upload speeds. Regardless, the problem is causing widespread anger among Epic4G owners, many of whom have bitterly noted the irony of being charged a $10 surcharge so they can endure data transfers that are slower than they had 4 years ago (and a quarter of the speeds enjoyed by Evo owners on the same 3G network)." Cellphone networks are fickle beasts; can anyone out there with an Epic provide a counterexample?
Epic fail
"Don't worry. We are slowing down the Evo speeds too and we will be charging them $29.99/month for wifi hotspot."
--- We need more Ron Paul!
VOIP, Video Chat are good examples. There's more to the internet than files.
Movies and pictures shot with your phone. Runs into the 100 megabytes for a couple of small movies.
Video. Most phones have cameras. You could upload directly to YouTube.
So long as people keep paying their bills, the market is bearing this imposition. I am all but certain that this is another example of telcoms limiting and crippling their services rather than improving their infrastructure. AT&T taught the industry a hard lesson with their iPhone exclusivity deal. They burdened their entire infrastructure which was unprepared for the load. I am of the opinion that Sprint seeks to avoid the same. Additionally, as these handheld computers are getting phone network enabled, I suspect VOIP and other forms of internet communications will become more frequently used. So they will sell you a "phone" and you will in turn use it to bypass their business model? Not if they can help it.
It more than just what the market allows; compare what we have in the US to say, Europe, and you will come to the conclusion that we're simply seeing the effects of regulatory capture.
I have to agree - don't "be angry" as a customer, phone them up and complain. If they won't do anything for you, cut the service there and then and tell them why. If they bother to argue about things, dig out your contracts, file official complaints, etc. But, ffs, don't just "get angry" on a forum they probably never read and don't care about while you're still paying your monthly fee. Damn well complain, move companies, terminate contracts, etc.
This is the sort of thing you should realise while the contract is still fresh if it's important to you, so use the early get-out clause and introductory periods and get the hell off it. If you keep paying, it's really NOT that important to you. And if you entered into a cast-iron contract that you can't get out of (HIGHLY unlikely) for a service that you didn't bother to read up on, check terms, insist on minimum speeds, etc. then that's your own tough luck.
I still can't figure out why people pay for shit that they don't want, and then complain about it.
The difficulty is that the banks won't lend to improve infrastructure, as nobody is sure where the demand will go. In fact, I have some sympathy for the carrier. When O2, which is in my view a pretty [comment redacted owing to libel laws in UK] telecoms supplier, introduced the iPhone, our company was using O2. I noticed that every time a visitor with an iPhone entered our offices, calls started to drop out. I guessed that there wasn't enough bandwidth to the cell tower, and the iPhone was getting prioritised. I couldn't prove what was going on but I was suspicious. I jumped up and down and we switched to Vodafone; problem disappeared. I guess a supplier introducing a new, potentially high bandwidth device, would be careful so that, in the language of sales consultancy, they don't turn POCs into PPOCs (pissed off customers into permanently pissed off customers.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
My cable modem uploads at around 100k, and I don't have any problem with that. What exactly are these people doing on their cell phones that is so important that they can't tolerate an upload speed that is only 50% faster than my cable modem?
And yes, I can upgrade my cable modem to faster service for a price but I willingly have so far opted not to; I find my current cable modem to be more than sufficient for my own needs.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Information about the $10 "4G tax" can be found in http://explainthefee.com/ . There's a new post about how to cancel service without paying ETF in case you want out
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Exactly. Most contracts will include a dispute process of some sort or another. For business contracts, once the dispute is filed, you stop paying and they can't disconnect you for not paying. For individual contracts, I can't speak to it, but I suspect that the local and state laws may have something to add to that where consumer protection is concerned.
I use a Nokia E63 and I use VOIP on an almost daily basis. I keep an 8 gig memory card in it and on the odd occasion when I am leaving the office and not dragging around a laptop, I will tend to put creatives from current campaigns on the phone just in case one of the traffickers "misplaced" their copies. I can upload them from my phone.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The Sprint Palm Pre, which is a 3G phone, has its downloadspeed capped to 64KBps (kilobytes, not kilobits) per second. A foul practice indeed, but there's actually a homebrew patch that removes this limitation.
Since when is the market bearing a cost a justification for over pricing? No business has a right to massive profits, especially when it's the result of maintaining a oligopoly over the particular market.
What massive profits are you talking about? If you had even remotely bothered to type in a few search keywords, you would know that Sprint is losing money $250M every month. The claim that they are charging above-market prices or maintaining an oligopoly is absolutely inconsistent with the facts.
If anything, a company that's consistently (five straight quarters) posting losses should be raising prices or cutting costs since obviously they cannot burn through money forever. What's more, Sprint spent billions deploying WiMax, so it's sort of silly to accuse them of failing to keep up infrastructure. If anything, they are desperately trying to capitalize on their first-to-market status on 4G.
[ Market pricing or not, they should fix the Epic's upload problem. I was responding to the narrow and entirely incorrect (and trivially verifiable!) claim that Sprint is making massive profits, when in fact they have posted a loss in the last 5 quarters. On a personal note to the OP, please verify your claims -- at least where it's trivial to do so. ]
Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. If it were an intentional limitation on the Epic by Sprint, then they would have done the same thing on the Evo, which has been out for several months. Or they would have ADDED the limitation in an update.
Besides, we are talking about the 3G and not even the 4G connections. Something else is going on...
I happen to have N900 myself and given the powerful stuff this phone enables me to do having good upload bandwidth is really damn useful. But, I can imagine several use-cases for non-N900 users too: video chat applications, uploading pictures and recorded video to whatever service your phone supports, some mobile MMO-like games,etc. Especially uploading video tends to take a damn long time if your upload limit is set to very low, and any kind of multiplayer games usually benefit from the lower latency.
My guess to them limiting the upload bandwidth so low is the fear of people using mobile networks for P2P. It is a reasonable fear and it most likely does happen, but is their network really of so poor quality that it can't handle such loads or is it just a just-in-case? That's the question. Compared to my provider here in Finland I have about 700kbit/s upload bandwidth, atleast when I tested it on my N900 and no limits to the amount of data to be transferred.
In the forum thread mentioned there appears to be a comment regarding the phone's firmware.
Apparently, some guys over at xda developers uploaded the european rom and were able to get full bandwidth from the phone. Given the reception issues and other communication problems I'm going to say this is a badly cooked rom on part of the Sprint side. (Even more Epic fail).
Now, at the moment this is completely unconfirmed and if you are an Epic fail owner I would suggest visiting their site to confirm.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
> Premium services such a "touch tone service" was (and still is I believe) an "option" that must be paid for.
Ironically,"touch tone" service is really only premium service in the eyes of the sales department. From an engineering POV it's actually cheaper way of signalling than make/break pulses.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
People might send attachments via email, might upload videos to youtube, might tether, voip, video chat, maybe they're streaming audio for a few people, this is a few obvious things.
>>>Putting POTS under regulatory scrutiny really made them behave properly
Not really. POTS fell under regulatory control in the 20s, and then we had to deal with a stagnation of technology due to the government-created ATT monopoly for another 60 years. (Example: Modem technology stagnated at 1200 bits/second from the 1950s to the 80s.) Basically the same thing that happened in East Germany with their piece-of-junk Tribant car - technology froze in a WW2 state.
It was only when the government finally deregulated and allowed competition (i.e. put power in the hands of the consumer to choose their long-distance provider, and modem/phone) that things improved for the average person. Competition breeds innovation.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Either you don't know what's going on or you're purposefully spreading misinformation. Virgin and Boost are Sprint. Cingular is AT&T. Really there are only 4 companies to speak of: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. And it'll probably be down to 3 in the next few years.
But these 4 companies don't compete very vigorously. If anything, the cost of SMS messaging leads me to believe they're coordinating.
Unfortunately, most contracts require dispute resolution through a mediator of the service provider's choice, who almost always side with the service provider. And, thanks to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, it is up to the mediator to decide whether the mediation clause is fair.
the point is if you count the number of companies that have as capital assets real live TOWERS
ATT owns towers
Sprint owns towers
Verizon owns towers
T-Mobile Owns towers
everybody else rides on those towers (with of course peering agreements giving you towers owned by say Verizon having a Sprint transponder and an ATT transponder)
Virgin mobile IN THE US uses sprint towers (and the sprint PRL)
Nextel is owned by sprint and is i think being phased out (BOOST uses nextel/sprint towers)
Cingular is ATT
Cricket leases tower space from whomever
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Virgin Mobile sold their US operations to Sprint. Virgin Mobile never owned their own network in the US; it was always just rebranded service (an MVNO) from Sprint running on Sprint's network. Yes, Virgin US is a CDMA service, unlike Virgin's GSM service elsewhere.
Recently they decided to get out of actively running a US wireless operation in the US and sold the business and licensed the brandname to Sprint. Virgin Wireless UK has nothing to do with it any more.
So Sprint is now four main brands: Sprint, Nextel, Boost, and Virgin US, plus half or so of Clear. Sprint also provides MVNO support to about half a dozen other smaller brands.
Sig for hire.
The most credible theory I've seen so far is that the towers and/or Epic4G don't recognize each other as being capable of EVDOrevA, and are falling back to rev0 (which, conveniently, has a reverse data rate of almost exactly 153kbit/sec). I personally doubt Sprint would have done something as stupid as blatantly throttle Epic4G owners down to 150kbit/sec, because they're smart enough to know that Epic4G owners were going to be pulling out the benchmarks and comparing metaphorical penis size with Evo owners from day one, and anything that blatant would have been discovered *instantly*.
The good news is that if it's just a tower-phone identity issue, it's almost certainly something that can be fixed. The bad news is that if it requires tower-config changes, Sprint will probably try to work it into their normal progressive maintenance schedule instead of doing whatever it takes to deploy a potentially-disruptive fix immediately.
Hence, my primary motive for getting this story to Slashdot: harness the power of public relations to light a fire under Sprint's feet and force them to escalate this to a matter of their highest and most urgent priority, instead of plodding along and allowing Epic4G owners to languish at 150k for the next few months.
Do you have any idea how much regulation and enforcement action was required to allow the consumer to choose their LD carrier? The Bells didn't just wake up one day and decide you could hook a non-bell phone to their network, they were ordered to allow it. They don't interface with VoIP providers because they like them.
They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a competitive marketplace. At a minimum it will be necessary to insist that all phones be unlocked and capable of operation on any cell network in the U.S. and that purchase of the phone be unbundled from the service. Next up will be ending the sneak attacks by huge bills.
After all, this is an industry that has pulled every dirty trick in the book including designing phones so that the user can accidentally do things that result in significant charges.
As a side note, the technology did NOT freeze. In that time they went from a system where a human being physically connected pairs of wires carrying analog signals together to complete a call to a fully automated digital network. The services offered to the CUSTOMER stagnated.
Video. I was at the Metro (concert venue in Chicago) last night, and took some pretty awesome video from the side of the stage while the band was playing, and uploaded it from my Nexus One. Trivial? Perhaps. But that's what I'm paying T-Mobile for unlimited data for (+1 for 3G in Chicago; had 2.5Mb/s up).
What 4G in the US&A? say what? Ah, it was only a marketing thingy.. like those chinese mp5 plyers... Afaik the only real 4G networks are in Sweden and Norway... (We are talkin some 50 Mbit downstream here) I wonder what real 4g will be called in the us.. Epic 4G, no wait... that's taken too.
The monopoly wasn't given, it was bought and paid for in various ways both legal and shady. In the same way various radio, TV and wireless carriers bid on and buy radio spectra, cable, power and phone network companies pay for the right-of-way to build and operate their networks. They paid for their monopolies. Make no mistake about it. Now as far as the deals the carriers got for their money? Well, I agree that it is essentially used as a license to rape the consumer. But watch for when the deals are up for renewal and contact your government representatives. If you want to see change, make sure they know some people are watching.