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4G vs. 3G vs. WiFi Throughput For Samsung's Epic 4G

Posted by timothy on from the taste-of-things-to-come dept.

MojoKid writes "Some of the most popular Android smartphones currently available are members of Samsung's Galaxy S line. Powered by Samsung's own 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based Hummingbird processor with a four-inch Super-AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, it's no wonder Samsung has sold over 5 million Galaxy S phones. The Epic 4G variant of this phone, available through Sprint, is also one of the scant few 4G capable devices on the market currently. Sprint's 4G network utilizes WiMAX mobile broadband, with a theoretical maximum throughput of 40Mbps. Sprint claims that the average download speed on its 4G network is between 3 to 6Mbps, with peak download speeds above 10Mbps. The performance figures seen here actually show solid throughput for the Epic, besting competitive 3G devices and even versus some with a Wi-Fi connection. 4G WiMAX service is still rather limited geographically, but hopefully devices like these will help to kick the roll-out into gear a bit."

15 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Anecdote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Living in one of the better covered 4G cities, my personal experience is that both WiMAX availability and throughput vary widely within the metro area. I would describe the WiMAX coverage as "spotty." When available it seems uniformly faster than 3G on my and my friends' phones. I have seen it get as high as 8Mbps download and as low as 1Mbps download (using speedtest.net). Coverage tends to get better as you near the city's core.

    Throughput seems a difficult thing to measure, as it varies so widely in my experience.

    1. Re:Anecdote by fsterman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Mod parent up.

      I used to sell for the network that Sprint uses for it's "4g" coverage- it's total crap. Even at fixed positions, the signal waxes and wanes significantly. Only the most naive of customers were really satisfied with it, the rest hated it.

      Maybe this test was at a good location, but the overall experience is just as spotty as current data networks.

      --
      Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
  2. Who really cares about speed at this point? by mattcsn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What good does ever-increasing speed do if I just end up blowing through my data cap that much faster? I can live with lower speeds, I just want reasonable prices per GB.

    1. Re:Who really cares about speed at this point? by bm_luethke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It depends on what you are doing - there are applications that need speed but will rarely push much data on a monthly basis.

      For instance we have a product that runs on phones that can use the 3g connection for public safety communications back to the home base for communications (this particular application includes visual elements too - if they simply need voice there is a telephone connection that avoids this). It is basically unusable for that application in the vast majority of the country even as a backup let alone for a primary means of communication. Connections are spotty, dropped packets happen quite often even on good solid connections, latencies are atrocious, basically unusable. It works great through a WiFi connection - no problems whatsoever. It doesn't use a lot of data monthly because it is only use when an ongoing incident is happening, lots of data over short periods.

      It becomes truly important in some areas like that - the classic example is if someone is asking permission to shoot and kill someone and the response is "don't shoot" and the "don't" gets cut off - it is a real problem. There have been times where it takes over a minute for the message to reliably get there. Most of us will never have that occur but if you are in a security and disaster response arena it is quite important - people can and will die over that type of thing. Smart phones (and the resultant data networks) are so geared towards web browsing and checking e-mails where those things are irrelevant they have basically made it impossible to use for a great number of applications that it would be ideal for.

      I haven't been able to test any 4G networks, but some of the other engineers I work with (a different company than the one I'm on - we resell and do custom software on some of their products) has basically said that while the 4G networks they have tested are quite a bit better and you can really tell the difference whilst "normal" internet tasks, it still is so focused on non-mission critical tasks that the carriers simply do not care about anything else and have made no attempts to make it better. We have seen that too in our other line of products (storage and disaster recovery products for mission critical transactional machines - credit card processors, 911 call processing, and a few stock exchanges) and some of even the server class hardware accepts error rates that we simply can not. It can be tough to find providers that truly understand that some people can't accept problems that are just fine for video games, web browsing, and using a word processor. In all of those cases the question is "If you have been shot and are calling 911 would you want your call going through that?". That is why voice connections are so heavily regulated and downtime is heavily fined - data not so much.

      So yea, care about speed too - it could potentially one day save your life. There are many more applications that for these data pathways than just web browsing and streaming video.

      --
      ------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
  3. Re:iPhone 4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The iphone doesn't have 4g

  4. Re:iPhone 4 by tayhimself · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a Samsung Epic review, not a comparison with other phones, as far as I can tell.

    Err is that why other phones are in the graphs? For a more detailed and IMO better review this page on Anandtechhas wifi only comparison including the iphone 3gs and 4.

  5. LTE by sonicmerlin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Clearwire is trialling an LTE network in Phoenix right now, saying it will achieve 20-70 Mbps throughput. They have the spectrum to actually achieve this too. When WiMax 2 and LTE Advanced come out, assuming enough competition exists to prevent caps from showing up, DSL companies will be put out of business. This of course is why Verizon sold its rural landlines to Frontier. They know they can come back with 700 MHz LTE, and later LTE a, and blow the pants off of slow-poke 1.5 Mbps DSL.

    1. Re:LTE by sonicmerlin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      LTE, LTE a and WiMax 2 has much better latency than WiMax. TeliaSonera in Sweden has a commercial LTE network running with latencies of 20-40 ms in real usage settings. It's ridiculously fast. Online gaming over wireless will be great.

    2. Re:LTE by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's the Latency, Stupid was written way back in the dark ages (1996), but Stuart Cheshire's essay on latency vs. bandwidth is still a good read.

  6. Re:iPhone 4 by MBCook · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, but between a faster CPU and HSPUA radio, the iPhone 4 is noticeably faster 3G in supported areas. I don't know about on WiFi.

    Example test

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  7. LTE-Vented pants. by Ostracus · · Score: 2, Informative

    They need to economically "blow the pants off" the competition first.

    --
    Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
  8. Slashvertisement? by Cidolfas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This reads like an ad with just enough to make it slashdot-worthy... but the line at the end makes me think it's just necessary gadget-lust spec gushing. I can't tell if he copy-pasted bits of the article from a press release, or just chose their writing style.

    --
    I am become /dev/null, destroyer of data.
  9. Re:iPhone 4 by toastar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That the Samsung Epic is the fastest phone that they tested.

    In other news my i7 Laptop scores better on benchmarks then my compaq 386...
    Could they really not find a G2 to test?

    Something I recently learned about android is how important the kernel is to download speeds, I went from 1mbps with stock android to 2-3mpbs with biffmod, with stock cm6 I only got. 300kbps.

    On one test I got 3.2Mbps.... Which is higher then what they're getting here... and this is on my G1.

  10. It's easy to be fast when the air is clear by jandrese · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How many 4G phones are out there right now? It has to be a tiny number compared to 3G handsets. It seems like it should be trivially easy for the phone to rip through data because there's little to no competition for the airtime at the moment. I'd be more interested in what this looks like in a couple of years when there is a million iPhones/Androids/etc... on Sprint all competing for the bandwidth.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  11. Re:They need a better connection for WiFi testing by ptbarnett · · Score: 2, Informative

    I get as high as 15 Mbits/second download from Speedtest.net on my iPhone 4

    After postng, I realized that was actually the Xtreme Labs test. So, I went and downloaded the Speedtest.net application. I got nearly 20 MBits/sec download and 15 MBits/sec upload (WiFi on a 25/15 FIOS connection).